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Computer as a tool in the medical field
Computer as a tool in the medical field
Computer as a tool in the medical field
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Cognitive enhancements come in many forms, starting as basic as a pill you can swallow for pain control, to as complex brain surgery and adding artificial parts to your brain. The question is, are these enhancements good or bad? That depends on many things, and people have very differing opinions about the topic. Following are some potential benefits and risks related to artificially enhancing the brain.
One of the many benefits of cognitive enhancements is the ability to lessen or even remove medical difficulties that stem from brain glitches or degeneration. According to Horstman (p.90-92), deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been shown to greatly increase the quality of life for individuals that have disorders such as Parkinson’s, Tourette’s, depression, hyperactivity, and many psychiatric disorders. DBS is a non-invasive process where electrodes are placed deep in the brain to stimulate or block the brain’s communication.
Two of the areas that have been most helped by DBS are depression and movement related disorders, such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s Disease (Horstman p. 94-96). The pacemaker type machine that connects the implanted electrodes in these patients is improving, and has shown great success and even more future potential to stop the tremors in a Parkinson’s patient with the flip of a switch. Additionally, experimental DBS has shown almost immediate and profound affects on patients with severe depression. More research is needed to fine tune DBS, but it is a great way to target problems that deal with larger areas of the brain.
Another potential benefit of cognitive enhancements it the ability to reverse the “broken” senses, such as sight, hearing and feeling. Artificial retinas (Horstman, p. 107-8) are still i...
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...r effort by people who don't accept the reality of growing older when it is done just to increase memory or function. For Parkinson's or epilepsy I can see the definite benefit but brain surgery to "improve" your mental capacity? No, and I don't think it is in the same class as facelifts or plastic surgery like I read in some of the stuff I found. Of course I'm not in favor of that much either. Accept how God made you and how you age.
Works Cited
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Greely, H. T. (2010, July 14). Enhancing brains: What are we afraid of? Retrieved from http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=28786 Horstman, J., & Scientific American, inc (2010). The Scientific American brave new brain. San
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In “Can You Build a Better Brain”, the author, Sharon Begley discusses how the cognition processes better. He starts by presenting some experiments that prove nutrition did not support the brain smarter. According to the article, he believes that the “cognitive capacity” can be amended by concentration in people’s behavior. He further believes that people’s intelligence do not depend on own skills; however, as long as people peceive new things, their synapses and brain systems will
Ratey, John J. (2008). Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. New York, NY: Little Brown and Company.
During the later part of the 19th century magents were used to induce neuronal activity; however, in the later part of the 20th century, Barker and his colleagues illustrated that magnetic stimulation in human motor cortexes produces depolarization of cortical areas (Eitan, & Lerer, 2006). TMS is a noninvasive therapeutic technique where an electromagnetic coil is put above the awake patient’s scalp and then magnetic pulses are moved throughout the brain (George, Lisanby, & Sackeim, 1999). The magnetic pulses and coil combine to create an electrical activity in the cortical tissue which can cause localized neuronal depolarization. Not only has TMS been the topic of many recent research studies, but deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (deepTMS) has also been researched to decipher the effectiveness for treating depression. DeepTMS is when the coils have been designed to create a more intense electrical field deep in the brain tissue. DeepTMS uses several separate points of projection around the periphery of the brain while minimizing the electrical charge to the br...
Goldmann, David R., and David A. Horowitz. American College of Physicians Home Medical Guide to Parkinson's Disease. New York: Dorling Kindersley Pub., 2000. Print.
With more than 200,000 US cases per year, Parkinson’s disease has become a major part
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In the article “Brain Gain: The Underground World of “Neuroenhancing” Drugs” (Yorker 2009) Margaret Talbot discusses the misuse of prescription drugs that enhance academic performance at the college level. First Talbot introduces readers to a young college history major at Harvard University named Alex who receives a description of a demanding, busy life which seems impossible to control without the safety unapproved adopted use of a drug named Adderall. After that Alex’s dependency on the prescription drugs cognitive enhancers is described when he asks his doctor to increase the amount of intake and the listing of his daily routine on using Adderall during a week that required him to write four term papers. Next Talbot describes a personal
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With today’s world more inclined towards war than peace, many people encounter injuries and damages. Thousands of soldiers, in US military, develop deficits to their long-term memory owing to head trauma, brain injury or memory loss, even if they don’t bear any kind of physical damage. This is not only limited to US military but military all over the world. This can even extend to a common man who might have come across a similar problem of brain injury. In response to this, the US military is funding research that is strategically designed to improve memory by brain stimulation via implanted electrodes. It is believed that this can also help people who have suffered strokes or those who have lost their capability to recall due to ageing. The
With the advent of this new technology doctors and psychiatrists may have finally reached the light at the end of the tunnel. Well not exactly, but the state of the art new technology, Optogenetics, does offer an innovative new approach to the study of the brain, and, more importantly, the treatment of patients. The use of light had been surmised to be a valuable way to control cells many years prior by Francis Crick (Crick 2024), but no one had been able to pull all the pieces together. While it’s by no means perfectly safe: there are still uncertainties about the long-term effects and the level of specificity it offers can only control groups of neurons up to .3 (mm^3) instead of individual neurons. Optogenetics still provides benefits over our current pharmaceutical and surgical technologies with its specificity, both temporally and spatially. In light of these facts, doctors should consider optogenetics as a safe and efficacious way to treat neurological disorders unresponsive to current methods.
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could be modified or expanded upon given what has been learned about the brain through
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