The Neurodevelopmental Hypothesis

I like how this is not narrowed down to just one possibility of the cause of schizophrenia.  If there was only one thing linked to schizophrenia, scientists and researchers would have found it.  Instead, they are finding something in common in most patients with schizophrenia.  According to the neurodevelopmental hypothesis schizophrenia begins with abnormalities in the prenatal and neonatal development of the nervous system, based on either genetics or other influences.  The genetic influence is a bit unclear and unreliable to deem the sole cause because there hasn’t been a specific gene linked to schizophrenia.  They know there is does warrant some genetic basis since the probability of family members, and especially monozygotic twins, having schizophrenia is higher than in other relationships.

What I found to be interesting, and again consistent with the way I think, is the neurodevelopmental hypothesis.  Problem is that I never really have science to back up my own thoughts.  Just inferences based on stuff I read here and there.  Doctors, websites, books, parents and mostly anyone that gets news of your pregnancy warn you to take good care of yourself, take your prenatal vitamins, eat right, don’t stress and enjoy your pregnancy.  I have only one child, and when I was pregnant with him I made sure to stay away from chemicals, not lift heavy things, stay away from smoke, and obviously to stay away from drugs and alcohol.  People do not even realize how incredibly crucial the development that is going on within you.  You don’t want to mess up that cycle of development in anyway.  In the picture below, the 8 week fetus looks extremely small and like it doesn't have  much going on, but it's one of the most important parts of development of the nervous system and brain. 

 

 

My first trimester, which is when most of the major development occurs, was so exhausting.  I was still small, not even a belly yet, and I was exhausted and felt the most pregnant than any other time in my pregnancy.  Probably even more than when I was 9 months.  I really do think that disruption of the development effects the brain and gives rise to abnormalities that could be the trigger for schizophrenia or other psychological disturbances.  I want to be cautious and NOT make it seem like anyone that gets sick when they are pregnant or is stressed will have a schizophrenic child.  A child is very versatile being.  It can withstand more than you think and even some slight problems shouldn’t be too worrisome.  I do think it is important to protect yourself as much as possible.  Eat well so they have the proper nutrition to develop.  Stay away from extremely harmful things, including excess stress.  Do not let a fever get too high because the cytokines that your body produces could cross the placenta and excessive cytokines could impair brain development.  Give your child a healthy shot at life but just simply trying to protect yourself.  Even if it reduces the chances of later developing schizophrenia by .000001 percent, it is worth it.

Awesome little song about Neurodevelopment:

 

How Antidepressants Work

This is something I seldom do, get into the whole chemical and scientific part of psychology.  Most of the time I am so blown away by something else that I pay little attention to what’s happening at the synapses of the brain.  This is interesting because you can’t just say A causes B.  It’s a lot more complex.  We usually use anti-depressants to increase the presence of serotonin or other neurotransmitters at the synapse.  Just because we need more serotonin at the synapse doesn’t mean that the brain is not producing enough of it.  People with depression actually produce normal amounts of serotonin, sometimes even more!  Studies have shown that decreasing serotonin does not make one feel depressed.   So there has to be more to it.

 

I think the theory about BDNF is pretty interesting.  By putting it plainly, I think that I would be depressed too if my hippocampus was smaller than normal.  The hippocampus is important for synaptic plasticity, learning, and proliferation of new neurons.  BDNF (Brain derived neurotrophic factor) helps by facilitating new learnin gthath builds new synapses and removes many old ones.  It seems that learning and reporudction of new cells in such an important area of the brain is important, if not essential.

Stress and Health

I recently watched a National Geographic documentary about stress and the harmful effects on health.  Robert Sopolsky has been researching the effects of stress on health for many decades and has received the McArther Fellowship genius grant for his research.  Every summer he would goes to Africa to study primates and their behaviors and found that the health of the Alfa baboons he was studying was particularly better than the more subordinate ones.  The weaker baboons, or the one’s lower on their social hierarchy had more fat around their abdomens, more buildup in their arteries and were in poorer health than the ones at the top.  Interestingly, the results seem to be duplicated when they studied the social hierarchy in people with Civil Service jobs somewhere in Britain.  The ones at the top, the ones with more autonomy and more control over their work -load and schedule, were in overall better health.  

Prolonged stress can also harm the hippocampus.  The hippocampus is the main place in the brain where learning and memory take place.  With the hippocampus being vulnerable, the cells are more susceptible to damage or death.  The dendrites in the hippocampus of chronically stressed people or primates shrink or die, thus, impairing memory or learning.  I was blown away by the research.  It seems very simple, very obvious.  People who are less stressed are happier, healthier, and maybe even smarter, but it provided the scientific evidence in such an interesting way.  I really recommend it.  Here’s a clip to tease you and encourage you to watch.  There were many different areas of research that are so intriguing but I do not have the capacity of knowledge to thoroughly explain them.  I encourage people to be aware of these things, and how science is so incredibly amazing.

Sleep Paralysis

It’s something that used to happen to me a lot.  I would work long, tiring bar shifts from 4pm to 1 am.  When I would wind down enough to finally go to sleep, I would be so still and ready to fall asleep… then suddenly I knew it was coming.  Seconds away and I couldn’t do anything about it.  I would fall into a sleep paralysis.  I would try so hard to get up, but couldn’t move anything.  Sometimes I would even imagine myself, visualize it, getting up and turning on the light, but when the light didn’t brighten the room I would realize that I was still asleep and I was back in bed with my eyes slit open slightly so I could kind of see the room but couldn’t move to do anything.  It would happen so often that I even tried to yell or shake my husband (boyfriend at the time), but nothing.  It was a scary feeling because I would feel a sudden rush of energy, sometimes it felt like it was right in front of me, but I couldn’t see it or confront it.  I started to do some research and realized that there is a perfectly scientific explanation for it. 

 

 

Sleep paralysis is when I person is having trouble transitioning from one sleep cycle to the next.  Usually, most of your sleep is in the NREM state (non-rapid eye movement).  Then later in the night or possibly early in the morning you transition to REM (rapid-eye movement).  During REM sleep, cells in your pons send messages that inhibit the motor neurons that control the body’s large muscles.  Usually when you wake up the cells shut off and you regain your muscle control, but occasionally the pons remain in the REM state for a few seconds or even a few minutes.  Before I researched what it was about, I knew that it had to be something like that.  I was conscious but couldn’t move. It’s a scary feeling especially because there really was a sense of evil or something lurking around you.  Even scarier when I started reading about how people in other cultures interpret it.  They all have explanations about ghosts, the devil, or demons sleeping on your chest, possibly trying to take your soul.  I just have to take a step back, calm down, and listen to science. Haha! Check out this link that explains it exactly as I experienced it.  With a few scholaraly quotes to accompany it. 

And a documentary trailer:

 

Sex and Gender

I am also enrolled in a Sociology of the Family class and found that the issue of gender to be crossing over in both psychology and sociology.  Living in this Western world, which is all we have ever known, makes us isolated from the beliefs of other countries and cultures.  We usually assume that we are doing things the right way, and this is the only way to be.  Go to school, grow up, get married with a person of the opposite sex and have children.  When we see another culture, with their different beauty ideals, clothes, religion, and style of living, most people assume that they are almost “savage” like.  In no way shape or form do I believe this to be true.  I consider myself to be a very culturally sensitive person.  I see the way that cultures adapts, and works together, forms communities and ways of living that are suited for them and they fulfill all their duties and responsibilities.  They are spiritually connected to a higher power and they are successful at continuing their culture.  I find it to be extremely beautiful. 

When I was trying to understand what the difference between sex and gender was, I realized that gender is a construction of people and society.  A man can have a female gender or vice-versa.  Sex is biological.  It has to do with hormones and physical characteristics.  In our Western society we have two sexes and three genders.  Male, Female and transgender.  The transgender is typically thought of as a person who was born one way, but altered there biology by undergoing a sex change operation and possibly receiving hormone therapy to successfully transition from one sex to the other.  Even if the change is successful, it’s hard for our society to see that person as a “true” male or female.  A society in Indonesia, known as the Bugis, has 5 genders.  This is really hard for me to wrap my head around because I always knew that there were males and females, and maybe even some people who switched it up, but five?!  That seems like a lot, and a lot to be acceptable.  NO TABOO?  How is that possible?   Well it is and here is a little video to help understand how they view the different genders.

 

 

Pheromones

I am a believer in Evolution.  Not to say that I do not believe in God, I do.  I don’t want this post to become a little too religious or philosophical but I want to point out how I see the beauty and messages of Science pop-up in everyday life.  Even when I’m doing a reading for your Biological Psychology class, I see evolutionary evidence that reinforces my Darwinist perspective.  Apparently, the vomeronasal organ is a set of receptors located near, but separate from, the olfactory receptors.  And VNO receptors are specialized to respond only to pheromones.  Adult humans have a VNO, but it is very small and doesn’t have receptors.  So why is it there?  Well, maybe it is vestigial, or left over from our evolutionary past. 

It’s not the only thing that humans have or can have that is vestigial.  We just recently learned about goose bumps and why we even have them? What purpose does it even serve? Well think about any time you might have gotten goose bumps, maybe you were a little scared or nervous?  Something might have spooked you or made you feel uneasy?  Then you get all these little bumps all over your body.  Our ancestors, maybe the Neanderthals or some primate, probably had more hair on their body than we do now.  They might have developed this trick to scare or ward off a dangerous animal or threat, because making yourself look bigger and scarier by fluffing out your body hair seems like a pretty clever thing to do.  In any case, we do not need to do that anymore because we have less hair now, at least on our bodies.  Oh and we have weapons like guns.  But it is still a function that we have and don’t necessarily need anymore.  There are others, like our appendix, which was believed to be an extra place for digestion of leaves in earlier versions of humans. 

Which brings us back to the VNO in humans.  Since there are no receptors there, why do we still respond to pheromones?  It’s been discovered that part of the human olfactory mucosa contains receptors that resemble other species pheromone receptors. Some of the best evidence of human response to pheromones is when two women who spend a lot of time together often have synchronized menstrual cycles. LOL this is Science!  I found this to be true, when I lived with a roommate and shared the same bathroom.  There are lots of studies that show evidence that human body secretions act as pheromones, the effects are probably not as strong as they are in animals but they are present.  They have a lot to do with finding and attracting mates.  And you need to ask yourself, “Why?”  The answer is a lot more complex than you might think, and involves a lot more science and history of human beings.  Do not dismiss it, it’s there and it’s real.  It does not discredit God or his teaching.  Science and Religion should be able to coexist, but it would be foolish to embrace one and ignore the other.

Learning/Memory- Why I'm curious about it.

As far as improving memory goes, understanding the mechanisms of LTP seem promising since there are ways of stimulating and inhibiting the production of the proteins that are linked to learning. 

The best way to learn something is to link it to an interesting memory or something that will sticks out in your mind.  If it engages your curiosity, it is more likely you will remember/learn it.  That is what I've been talking about, every single post I've made in this journal says, "I found this to be very interesting because it relates to....." and fill in the blank.  It's good to know I'm doing something right.  I am actually retaining a lot of the information because I find it really intriguing.  Lobotomies were interesting because they were gruesome and unnecessary.  I will never forget what they are now.  The stuff about hemispheres was interesting to me because I noticed that my husband isn't as gifted as I am with words.  (LOL) He's probably one of the like 35% of left-handers that do not process language in their left hemispheres like most people do.  Maybe, I can't say for sure, but given what I've read and what I know, I can hypothesize.  Pretty much everything in biological psychology is of interest to me, which is why I chose psychology as my major.  I think I will be pretty good in this field, supposing that I continue pursuing higher education.  I'm sure that learning will always be easy for me because I genuinly like this subject and I'm always curious about it.

This is a very interesting read called,10 Mind-boggling Psychiatric Treatments.  Give it a read because they mention phrenology, labotomy, and other ridiculous things I've learned about in other classes like "hysteria and the wandering uterus."  Also, some things I never knew. Super interesting.

Left handedness

I think to myself, jokingly of course, that it must be true that I am dominant in only one side of my brain (I must be using only half my brain!)  I cannot seem to wrap my head around the concept lateralization and contralateral control, it confuses me so much!  I think the most important thing I learned was that even though the hemispheres of the brain specialize in different operations, they communicate through the corpus collosum and through small commissures and that you use BOTH hemispheres and require cooperation from both sides.

My mother, my husband, and my son are all lefties.  The hemispheric dominance has been pretty interesting to me and I noticed something during my reading that I wouldn't have paid such close attention if it didn't pertain to someone in my life.  Speech, my husband had a stutter when he was a young boy.  He doesn't really stutter anymore but if he's trying to say something really fast or if I feel like he's got a rush of information that he just wants to let out I can hear it.  I read that most left-handers have a left- hemisphere dominance for speech but some might have right hemisphere dominance or a mixture of both and many people who have bilateral control of speech stutter.  I'm not a neuroscientist, but I'm assuming he might have bilateral control of his speech.  Maybe or maybe not? Either way, it was interesting to learn about.  

Here's some debunked rumors about lefties that I found very interesting:

Brain Plasticity

The idea of brain plasticity gives me hope.  Hope that it is not impossible to relearn the things that we already know after sever brain trauma or stroke.  If that were to happen to me I would have probably fallen into a state where I think it's impossible to learn how to do things again because biologically some of the neurons have died and I cannot make new ones.  Hopeless, right? Wrong!The way the brain compensates on it's own through collateral sprouts which creates new branches that form after damage is amazing.  It's strongly emphasized that getting on top of it early on through physical therepy and drug stimulation is best to ensure maximum plasticity.  It's seems to be hard work and a long road but there is still hope.  I have a cousin who had sever meningits as a teenager, it got so bad that he was mostly in a coma and they had to do surgeries to relieve the pressure in his brain.  At first, he couldn't do much, walk or talk or anything.  It's been about 10 years since that happened to him and now he talks and can have normal conversations, he can walk with the help of crutches, he drives and has a job.  He's not 100 back to the way he used to be but his life has improved significantly.  Brain plasticity as I see it, makes the first step for you but you have to take the initiative and do the rest.

My fascination with Glia

At the World Science Festival where many neuroscientists other doctors and physicists meet and discuss new discoveries in Science, there has been an interesting topic that has started to emerge.  Scientist have developed a new method to study the Glia, which type of cell in the brain.  The other type of cell which is a neuron and nueurons transmit information using electricity and seems like it is more concrete, more scientific because there has been more research and we  have been studying neurons longer.  After Albert Einstein's brain was examined after his death, they noticed that his the nuerons in his brain were not larger or that there was more of them or even different in any way to a normal person's brain. They did see that he had more glia cells which you might speculate is the reason for his genius.  Here's a TV report that explains Einsteins genius.

The way glia operates is what I find to be particularly interesting since even my ELEVENTH edition text book found it difficult to summarize the exact function of glia cells.  It seems to have this kind of mystical nature to it, the way we can't really understand a higher power because it is far too complicated and interrelated to everything around us.  Since the astrocysts wrap around a presynaptic  terminals of a group of related axons and it both takes and releases ions, it almost regulates or synchronizes the activity of axons (something we far better understand).  As amazing as axons are, you have something like an astrocysts who don't just play a supporting role but a main role in the way messages are sent.  They do much more in the forms of microglia, oligodendrocytes and even radial glia that guide the migration of neuron and their axons and dendrites during embryonic development.  Wow, embryonic development!  I think that is why I am so fascinated at the array of functions and how they seem to be lesser known but they guide our development and regulate the the way we feel, touch, perceive and understand on an even higher level than neurons.  I think that neuroscientists are barely scratching the surface on how to better understand glia cells but I think they will continue to fascinate us.  So much so that they will become even more than they already are despite our better understanding of them.

Introduction to Physiological Psychology

There is no doubt that psychology is very interesting to say the least and I’m especially excited about this class and this textbook because of the biological aspect.  After reading the three assigned sections I can tell you that even though EEG, MEG and fMRI parts are a little intimidating and kind of boring, the most interesting part thus far has been brain anatomy and behavior by using the newer methods like CT scans to construct images of the brain. If there are tumors or other abnormalities it may provide a reason for different behavior, emotions or lack thereof.  Sometimes a brain area might be enlarged on people who have special skills.  This is what I find to be absolutely fascinating because the way a person is raised and nurtured may be hard to determine but a picture of their abnormal brain can provide a more concrete and scientific understanding of their behavior.  During the summer I took Life Span and Development with Dr. Leka and we briefly touched on this subject of brain anatomy and behavior.  He told us about Charles Whitman, the man who sniper shot random victims at the University of Texas in 1966 and how an autopsy revealed a tumor near the amygdala, a region in the brain responsible for emotional reactions. 

 

I think it’s pretty evident that his medical condition might have played a huge role his reckless actions.  It doesn’t mean I discredit any other possibilities, I am well aware of the biopsychosocial model but I think it’s important to understand psychology at this level so we can separate judgments.   It makes me see him as a victim of disease rather than just a cold heartless murderer and that’s also very important in psychology.  In conclusion, I’m excited about these types of discoveries in my textbook!  Oh, also the section about animal research is making me stay more on the fence because I agree with both sides.  I would hate to hurt animals and cause them pain but it is very true that medical research is absolutely necessary. I would consider myself a “minimalist”.