Panic!

If you feel that your hands are sweating, have difficulty breathing, have numb hands, feel dizzy, start trembling you may be having a panic attack. I have never known anyone that had been diagnosed with panic disorder. The only ones I have seen having a panic attack are the people in shows or movies, but I know those people are acting. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, panic disorder affects about 6 million American adults and is twice more common in women than in men.  I had no idea that it affected so many people. People with panic disorders have a fear of disaster or of losing control even when there is no real danger.  It may also be a strong physical reaction and feel like a heart attack. Having a panic disorder can interfere with the person’s life as it affects their social environment. It might actually develop not from an object or an event but actually from the fear of having another attack. Even, when they are not experiencing a panic attack, they can spend much of their time worrying about when their next attack will be that they end up missing out on activities and places. In case I got you confused about what is panic disorder is, I provided a video in which a psychologist describes what it is. Now what causes panic disorder? The exact causes are unclear but there are theories that some factors might include family history, abnormalities in the brain, substance abuse, and major life stress. Usually it is treated with psychotherapy, medication or both. In the next video that I provided, it shows the life of James living with panic attacks and how little by little he overcomes his anxiety of subway.

 

Chronic Pain

I am a type of person that can keep complaining all day if I feel any kind of pain in my body. Like in many occasions I just take medication and the pain goes away. But if you have had pain on your body for months or years then it is something that you should worry about. This pain that keeps persisting and does not let you do the things that you were used to doing a few months before is called chronic pain. Chronic pain is a disease that can be made worse by environmental and psychological factors. There is no way to tell how much pain a person might have. The reason is because there is no test that can really measure the intensity of the pain and no device that can locate the pain precisely. The healthcare professionals can tell a person that their muscles or ligaments are already healed by why does pain continue. Well the reason is because there is something happening in the brain and is misinterpreting the sensitivity in our nervous system. I would have tried to give you an explanation about how signals are sent from one location to the brain but I think I would probably just confuse you. Instead, I provided a video from professional. In this video, Elliot Krane provides a detailed explanation about the mystery of chronic pain and reviews the facts about it. Some treatments such as physical therapy might make people feel better. Other sources of relief are taking medications or getting a surgery done might help lessen the pain, but it does not cure it completely.

Prosopagnosia or Face Blindness

 

You bump into someone or a family member that you might have recognize them because of their face, you say hello, but they do not respond back. They have this confused look on their face and say they do not recognize you. You might think they are being rude.  What if there is really a disorder that does impede you to recognize faces. This is called prosopagnosia or face blindness. It is a neurological disorder that is characterized by the inability to recognize faces. Depending on the degree of impairment, some people might only have difficulty recognizing familiar faces while others will be unable to distinguish a face as different from an object. There are even some people that are not able to recognize their own face. Here is a video about Dr. Oliver Sacks explaining what is prosopagnosia, explains the symptoms from the character from his book, and what people have experienced about the disorder. I would really encourage you to read his books it is where I first encountered this neurological disorder.

 

How do people get prosopagnosia? Well it can be the result of brain damage such as a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or neurodegenerative disease.  These types of damages can impair the right fusiform gyrus or nearby areas, which appears to coordinate the neural systems that control facial perception and memory. Individuals with this disorder might have trouble identifying their close friends or family. They depend on the voice, clothing, or unique physical characteristic to identify them. I imagine how difficult it is for the person but it must also be harsh for the surrounding family. Like in this next video, Terry has prosopagnosia and cannot recognize her mother’s face, but she can recognize her by the clothes she wears.

 

 

Research about the disorder and research about treatment is still being done today because there is limited information due to being few patients with prosopagnosia.

What is Wernicke's Aphasia?

"You know that smoodle pinkered and that I want to get him round and take care of him like you want before." The sentence that you just read, you might have not understood what this person was trying to say and think that they might have had too many drinks during happy hour.  What if I told you that the person trying to communicate was someone with Wernicke’s aphasia. Now what is Wernicke’s’ aphasia? Well people that have this aphasia may speak in long sentences that have no meaning, add unnecessary words, even create made-up words, and have impaired ability to remember the names of objects like in the example in the first sentence. The person can still talk smoothly but their comprehension and expressive language tend to be equally impaired. Although this might be a really old video, this is a good example of a person with Wernicke’s aphasia. The man is trying to communicate and does not know that what he is trying to say does not make sense. Usually people with this aphasia tend to have anosognosia (lack of awareness) of their communication problems.

 

How does this happen though? It is caused by damage in the posterior portion of the left temporal lobe knows are the Wernicke’s area, which is located near the auditory cortex. The Wernicke’s area is associated with the processing of words that we hear being spoken, or language input. In this following link, it explains the process of the Wernicke’s area and what its function is. It describes that when you hear the word first it goes to your auditory cortex and then sends it to the Wernicke’s area, which then associates it with a representation of a word that enable us to retrieve the meaning of the particular word. And when a person tries to say the word that they just have read, it goes first to the primary visual cortex, then transmitted to the Wernicke’s area. In both the auditory and visual method after going to the Wernicke’s area it travels to the Broca’s area, and then to the primary motor cortex. In case I got you confused I would say just go to this link and scroll down to the heading that says Models of Spoken and Written Language Functions in the Brain. The explanation from this site is much better than my version.

Why a Personality Change?

 

What do we know about the frontal lobe? We know that the frontal lobe is the one responsible to do planning, organizing, sequencing, and helps control our personality. Why is it important that we have a healthy frontal lobe? What if I told you that a frontal lobe injury could cause us to become a different person and lose our judgment. Like in this video by Woody Igou, he describes the function of a damaged frontal lobe, what behavior changes a person can have, and what type of consequences these behavior changes can cause. After watching this video I found out how important the frontal lobe is for our personality because it helps us in complex social interactions and it filters our impulsive behaviors by controlling our expressive speech. After a brain injury such as in an accident, stroke or having a tumor in the frontal lobe a person may go through some subtle or drastic personality changes. They are not the same person they “used to be”, they have become someone else these are words that family members or caregivers have described someone after a brain injury. Personality changes can be dramatic they can be an exaggeration of the person’s pre-injury personality that has intensified. For example, like in this video provided, the person used to be kind, laid back, easy going and then for some reason he became easily angered, agitated, and aggressive. The reason for his personality change was due to the fact the he had a benign tumor compressing his frontal lobe. So our personality makes us who we are and if you notice that you are becoming a total different person get your brain checked.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

You probably might not have noticed this while you were in your class, but you might have a classmate that was always hyper, got easily distracted, did not pay attention, and had difficulty controlling his/her behavior. Well maybe there might have been a reason for why they had this type of behavior. The behaviors described previously are some of the symptoms of someone who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  According to the National Institute of Mental Health website, the number of children being diagnosed with ADHD is rapidly increasing, especially boys who are four times likely to be diagnose with it than girls.  Scientists are unaware of what causes ADHD. They are not sure if it might be genetic, from environmental factors, or their diet like the theory of eating too much sugar. In the following video, it explains what ADHD is and describes the physical and chemical differences the brain has. So imagine having the brain of someone with ADHD they pay attention to everything and have four to five things going on in their minds at once. That is why they have trouble functioning in social and academic settings.

 I work with a lot of patients that are diagnosed with ADHD and I can immediately notice when they are on their medication and when they are not. When they are in their medication they look like zombies because they are zoned out and do not feel like doing anything. Supposedly the medication they take is to calm them and have a “focusing effect” which can help them improve their everyday life. In this video, it is being discussed if children should be medicated or not and if it’s the only effective treatment to use. This controversy had been questioned a lot because nowadays most physicians are prescribing medication like amphetamines (Adderall) and methylphenidate(Ritalin and Concerta) for the children diagnosed with ADHD, but how much is enough for the child. The medication method might not apply to all children because it might work and effect children differently. How do these prescribed medications affect the brain? They work by increasing the dopamine levels, in which dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is associated with pleasure, movement and attention. The effects of the stimulant are done slowly and steady increases of dopamine, which is similar to how dopamine is naturally produced in the brain.

So what happens with the children when they grow up? In the following video it describes how it might affect them in adulthood if they are not treated early in childhood.

 

Multiple Sclerosis

It was back in 2012, when I first heard about Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in one of my classes. Then I heard about it again when Jack Osbourne, the son of Ozzy Osbourne was being interviewed because he had been recently diagnosed with it. Now, that I was reading our textbook for our physiological psychology class that disease was referred as the topic of myelin sheaths was introduced. So I went on search to find out what causes Multiple Sclerosis and why is it important to have myelin in our brain. 

 I did my research and with the information provided from the website of National Multiple Sclerosis Society I was able to know and understand what it was, its symptoms, what causes it, and treatments. In-case you do go to the link I provided from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society I recommend watching the video they have provided in order to have a better understanding of how significant it’s the role of myelin. It sure did help me. I was able to understand that myelin is very important for our brain because when a person has MS the myelin in the central nervous system is damaged and the nerve fiber interferes with the transmission of nerve signals between the brain and spinal cord or other parts of the body. If you start feeling some numbness in your limbs or start losing your vision please go visit your doctor so you can make sure you don’t have it. With the video that I have provided  it explains the types of MS and how in each type a person might experience distinct symptoms. So no person experiencing MS has the same symptoms or feels the same way.

The bad news about MS is that there is still no cure for it. It is still mysterious for doctors so I hope that one day in the near future researchers find a way to stop this disease. Once again let me repeat what is MS, it is an autoimmune disease that attacks the central nervous system and it is an unpredictable disease because you never know how it will strike its victims. Like in this next video that I provided it shows the different experiences that each person has had to deal with living with Multiple Sclerosis.