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.