Narcolepsy
Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that causes excessive sleepiness
and frequent daytime sleep attacks. The most common symptoms of narcolepsy are:
periods of extreme drowness evert 3 to 4 hours during a day. You may feel a
strong urge to sleep, often followed by a short nap. This period can last for
about 15 minutes, although they can be longer. They often occur after eating,
but may occur while driving, talking to someone, or during other situations in
the life of the person who has this disorder. Narcolepsy is a nervous system
disorder, not a mental illness. Anxiety does not cause narcolepsy. Experts
believe that narcolepsy is caused by reduced amounts of a protein called
hypocretin, which is made in the brain. What causes the brain to produce less
of this protein is unclear .Narcolepsy tends to run in families. This means
that if you have it it’s because your parents or grandparents have it too.  Conditions that cause insomnia, such as
disrupted work schedules, can make narcolepsy worse.

There is no known cure for narolepsy. The goal of
treatment is to control symtoms.

Narcolepsy appears throughout the world in every racial and ethnic group, affecting males and females equally. But prevalence rates vary among populations. Compared to the U.S. population, for example, the prevalence rate is substantially lower in Israel about one per 500,000 and considerably higher in Japan about one per 600.

WHY DO WE DREAM?

Freud said that whether we intend it or not, we're all poets. That's because on most nights, we dream. And dreams are lot like poetry, in that in both things, we express our internal life in similar ways. We use images more than words; we combine incongruent elements to evoke emotion in a more efficient way than wordier descriptions can; and we use unconscious and tangential associations rather than logic to tell a story.

While we are asleep, our brain can swift through different stages of sleep. In stage on you experience a drifting in and out of sleep. You can be easily woken up. Your eye movement and body movements slow down. You may experience sudden jerky movement of your legs or other muscles. In stage 2 eye movement stops and your brain waves become slower. There will also be brief bursts of rapid brain activity called sleep spindles. Stage 3 is the first stage of deep sleep. The brain waves are a combination of slow waves, known as delta waves, combined with faster waves. During stage 3 sleep it can be very difficult to wake someone up. If you are woken up during this stage, you may feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes. Stage 4 sleep is the second stage of deep sleep. In this stage the brain is making the slow delta waves almost exclusively. In this stage it is also very difficult to wake someone up. Both stages of deep sleep are important for feeling refreshed in the morning. If these stages are too short, sleep will not feel satisfying. REM sleep is the sleep stage in which dreaming occurs. When you enter into REM sleep, your breathing becomes fast, irregular and shallow. Your eyes will move rapidly and your muscles become immobile. Heart rate and blood pressure increase. Men may develop erections. About 20 percent of sleep is REM sleep for adults.

With this this video I understood that in order to have a healthy life I need to sleep.

Sensory Deprivation

When we saw this video, I leaned lots of interesting things about sensory deprivation. Sensory deprivation is a technique used by scientists to see how the brain reacts when people to not see, taste, smell, touch or hear. It is interesting to know that everyone might have a different reaction and by giving a glance to this video, it is understood that extroverted people suffer more.  It is interesting to see the different reactions people had. Some slept all the time, others were first called but after 12 hours were very frustrated. With this experiment it is interesting to understand the personality a person had and how do they react to this. It was also interesting to know that while they were in this experiment they were only given little food and water. Another interesting thing is that after several hours the people who’s arms were raped had to unwrap because of several complications. It was also interesting to see the reaction they had when they were told that the 48 hours finished. This is because a voice appeared from nowhere and they were already accustomed to silence. If I had to do this experiment I will probably sleep for a long period of time, but at the end will get very frustrated.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia: a neurotically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/578457/synesthesia

Grapheme-Color Synesthesia: letters or numbers appear in color 

http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/UBNRP/gcsynesthesia/diagnosis.htm

Ordinal-Linguistic Personification : numbers, days of the week and months of the year take on personalities. 

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2007.19.4.694?journalCode=jocn

Number-Form Synesthesia:  number, days of the week and or months of the year are seen imprecise locations in space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form

Sound-Color Synesthesia: certain sounds trigger the viewing of colors or simple shapes

http://www.etown.edu/CETL.aspx?topic=An+fMRI+Study+of+Sound-Color+Synesthesia

Lexical-Gustatory Synesthesia: words cause specific taste sensations in the mouth. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical-gustatory_synesthesia

Mental Abilities: Genius, Savant and Autism

Explain in detail what "savant syndrome" means.

Savants are people who despite serious mental or physical disability have quite remarkable, and sometimes spectacular, talents. Savant syndrome is perhaps one of the most fascinating phenomena in the study of human differences and cognitive psychology. It is often claimed that, because of the extraordinary abilities involved, we will never truly understand human memory and cognition until we understand the savant. Savant syndrome is exceedingly rare, but a remarkable condition in which persons with autism, or other serious mental handicaps, or major mental illness, have astonishing islands of ability or brilliance that stand out in stark contrast to their overall disability.

http://www.psy.dmu.ac.uk/drhiles/Savant%20Syndrome.htm

What does genius mean?  Explain the difference between genius and savant.

Genius is actually very difficult to define. For one thing, it is quite a subjective label – for some, a genius is anyone with an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) higher than a certain value. Others, however, feel that IQ is a very poor and unrepresentative measure of a person’s total intelligence and therefore IQ scores are a poor reflection of real genius. Generally, it is accepted that a genius is not only someone with a very high IQ but also someone who breaks new ground with new ideas, discoveries, inventions or even works of art. In other words, a genius challenges the way other people view the field in which he works in – or even the world at large. The difference between genius and savant is that a genius is good at many areas while a savant is only good in an specific thing.  

http://www.aboutintelligence.co.uk/phenomenon-genius.html

What is a stroke and how could it affect your mental functioning?

A stroke occurs when a blood clot blocks a blood vessel or artery, or when a blood vessel breaks and interrupts blood flow to an and bleeding occurs into an area of the brain. The symptoms and effects vary according to the type of stroke, the part of the brain affected and the size of the damaged area. For some people the effects are severe, for some mild.  Usually the symptoms come on suddenly but they may come on during sleep.  Usually injury to one side of the brain affects the opposite side of the body.

http://brainfoundation.org.au/a-z-of-disorders/107-stroke

What is a functional MRI and how does it help us understand brain activity?

Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions. It is primarily used as a research tool in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and social neuroscience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_neuroimaging

What is the corpus callosum and what role does it play in your brain's activity?

The Corpus Callosum is thought to have a hand in problem solving. During adolescence, the nerve fibers thicken and process information more efficiently over time.

http://www.summ.org/tj/brain.htm

What is epilepsy and how might it affect your brain's abilities?

Epilepsy is a condition in which people have epileptic attacks (also known as seizures). It is one of the more common neurological conditions, affecting 0.5-1 per cent of the population. Epilepsy is not a single condition, but a group of conditions with differing causes, treatments and prognoses. At present, most doctors would not diagnose a patient as epileptic if they had only suffered a single seizure. This is because epilepsy is defined as a condition in which patients have recurrent seizures.The brain is made up of a vast number of nerve cells (neurones) which communicate with each other through electrical signals. The interplay between these neurones has to be carefully regulated for the brain to function properly.

http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/diseases/facts/epilepsy.htm

 What is autism?

Autism is a moderately rare condition resulting from a complex developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life. It is a neurological disorder that affects the functioning of the developing brain, resulting in sometimes profound communicative, social and cognitive deficits

http://www.psy.dmu.ac.uk/drhiles/Savant%20Syndrome.htm

What is Asperger's Syndrome?

Asperger syndrome  is a form of  autism. The condition is characterized by difficulties with Social Interaction, Social Communication and Flexibility of Thinking or Imagination. In addition, there may be sensory, motor and organizational difficulties. 

http://www.autism.org.uk/about-autism/autism-and-asperger-syndrome-an-introduction/what-is-asperger-syndrome.aspx

Accidental Genius

This video is one of my favorites because I leerned something new. This is what savants are. According to Dr. Darold Treffert, there are three types of savants: a normal savant who has a skill that is not useful, a gifted savant who has a conspicuous skill, and a prodigious savant who has an amazing skill. In this video several stories were narrated but that one that mostly impacted me was the one narrating Tommy McHigh life. He had an accident that caused him brain impairment. After this he became a savant. He was left him because he became obsessive with painting. Dr. Alice Flahery, from Hardvard University studied him and concludes that the bleeding caused by the damage on Tommy’s brain had caused pressure in his frontal and temporal lobes, producing instability and creativity. I believe it is very cool to be a savant but sometimes I would like to be consider normal then to be alone as Tommy is.

Make Me A Genius
This video was not my favorite but, it was very interesting to know that a person can memorize many chess games. Susan Polgar would prove she could be a master of the chess, when only men were considering being good on it.  When she was little, she was messing around her house and accidently found a chess game. She became fascinated with this and asked her father to teach her how to play.  As asked he did, and she became a genius on it. He took her to were he played, where only man played. At a young age Susan was the best chess player in the world. Which I believe is something AMAZING! She became better and better and at the age of 21, Susan was the #1 chess player in between 600 male players. But she did not stop. She defeated USA champion in less than 60 seconds. Although some won’t believe her story is amazing because it is related with chess, it is actually VERY VERY interesting. Without dough someone can become a genius in an area if they are constantly doing it…