The story Last Hippie by Oliver Sacks speaks of a man named Greg F. He was born and raised in New York. Oliver though born into a professional family had problems growing up. He was not only defiant, but he also used drugs (acid in particular). Oliver describes him as being truculent with his parents, while being secretive with his teachers. Under the influence of Timothy Leary, he dropped out of school to join the Swami Bhaktuvendata and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Sacks, 2012 pg. 43). He sought to find inner freedom and utopia. He began to achieve peace and was able to repress his appetite for drugs. It was while he was here that his vision begun to dim. His Swami there related his onset blindness to higher consciousness …show more content…
and illumination. It was not until a visit by his parents to the institution and his subsequent visit to hospital that indicated that he had a tumor. This tumor, though benign, had damaged his brain. His pituitary gland and optic chiasm tracts extending to both sides of the frontal lobes were damaged. The damage extended to the temporal lobes and the forebrain. The tumor was large and had done irreparable damage to Greg. Resultantly, Greg became blind and lost his memory. Discussion The case of Greg raises a series of issues on the effects of damage on the frontal lobes.
According to Sacks, who examined him, Greg demonstrated a great deal of neurological problems (Sacks 2012, pg. 45). He seemed childlike, he had lost his memory, was disoriented, confused and frail in health. What is astonishing however is that Greg was unaware of the problems that he had. Nonetheless, he found his consolation in music. He would sing songs of the sixties and this gave him much reprieve in facing his problems. His tumor had caused so much damage to his temporal lobes that he could not register new events but had recollection events prior to the damage. This loss of memory is known as amnesia. Two types of amnesia exist. Anterograde amnesia causes the loss of memory after the point of damage. Retrograde amnesia occurs when one cannot remember events prior to the point of injury. In the case of Greg, he has the latter (Neulinger …show more content…
2016). Retrograde amnesia occurs when an individual suffers a traumatic brain injury (King 2016).
Often the injury is caused by being hit with a blunt object, serious illness of a degenerative brain disease. The degree of severity depends on the extent of the damage. In some cases, it can be temporary. However, in such a case as Greg’s, it can be progressive. It normally affects the memory storage area of the brain, which are located in the frontal lobes. Apparently, the frontal lobes have a series of functions. They are involved in motor skills, language, memory, impulse control, sexual behavior and judgement. In this regard, damage to this area will cause problems with all of the above areas though to varying degrees. According to Levin (1987), TBI (traumatic brain injury) often causes harm to the frontal lobe. Memory impairment in TBI occurs in three main categories explicit, implicit and source-context memory. Explicit memory deals with recognition and recall. Patients with this form tend to perform poorly in visual and cure-recalled tests that their healthy counterparts. This form seemed the most prevalent in
Greg. Frontal lobe damage impairs the ability of an individual to learn new facts. It may take them long periods before they can grasp information such as location of places and names of people. Patients require immense repetition before they can grasp it. For instance, it took Greg about three months for him to get his way around the hospital (Sacks 2012 pg. 52). He was slow to habituation and familiarization. The long duration to learn shows damage to the temporal lobe and failing memory. One of the symptoms indicated by Greg was his inability to walk straight. A close examination revealed his limbs were spastic and thus he could not stand alone. This indicates a problem with his motor skills. According to Kuypers (1981), disturbance of motor functions manifests through loss weakness of the body and fine body movements. His wobbly walking is indicative of insufficient spacial orientation (King 2016). Again, frontal lobe damage affects judgement. Despite being blind, Greg did not seem to be aware of his environment. He “watched” television not by looking at the screen, but by listening to the audio and making up corresponding visual images. Moreover, he did not think others new he was blind. These events indicate that he had problems interpreting his environment and making the appropriate feedback. On the other hand, he had made up two Connies (Sacks 2016, pg. 52). Moreover, damage to the brain causes problems with sexual desire, appetite and sleep (Walker and Blummer 1975). These problems arise from damage to the diencephalon. The lack of stimuli does not seem to affect such patients as they are removed from their environment. In conclusion, it is evident that damage to the frontal lobes caused immense damage to the bodily and cognitive functions of an individual. They do not effectively recognize and respond to the things happening around them. Overtime the damage reduces their ability to lead full lives. However, through effective treatment and care, they can resume some of their functions as Greg did.
This damage is called chronic traumatic encephalopathy and it occurs when individuals suffer from many concussions or any other form of head injury. This damage has a lasting affect and can cause people to die at an earlier age then which they should. The life expectancy goes down for people with chronic
I intend to explore the effects of a parietal brain injury from the perspective of a neuropsychologist; ranging from types of tests that are employed when trying to determine the extent of the damage, to gaining an understanding of how this damage will affect the rest of the brain and/or the body. I will also explore the effects of a brain injury from the perspective of the family members, and their experiences with the changes that occur during the rehabilitation process. According to The Neuropsychology Center, “neuropsychological assessment is a systematic clinical diagnostic procedure used to determine the extent of any possible behavioral deficits following diagnosed or suspected brain injury”(www.neuropsych.com). As mentioned previously, a brain injury can be the result of many types of injuries or disorders, thus a broad range of assessment procedures have been developed to encompass these possibilities.
“Now, at last, Virgil is allowed not to see, allowed to escape from the glaring, confusing world of sight and space, and to return to his own true being, the touch world that has been his home for almost 50 years.” (Sacks, “To See and Not See” (41)
Wilson J.T.L., Teasdale, G.M., Hadley, D.M., & Wiedmann, K.D., Lang, D. (2012). Post-traumatic amnesia: still a valuable yardstick. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 56, 198-201
There are two main forms of amnesia that this article will focus on and they will be retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Retrograde amnesia is “a deficit in memory characterized by an inability to remember past events” (Purdy, Markham, Schwartz, and Gordon 2001). This means that any memory before an accident or a surgery can (will be) lost. Retrograde amnesia is has puzzled many people. “The fact that information acquired before the onset of amnesia can be lost (retrograde amnesia) has fascinated psychologists, biologists, and clinicians for over 100 years.” (Squire, Alvarez 1995).
Wesson, Donald R. "Psychedelic Drugs, Hippie Counterculture, Speed And Phenobarbital Treatment Of Sedative-Hypnotic Dependence: A Journey To The Haight Ashbury In The Sixties." Journal Of Psychoactive Drugs 2 (2011): 153. Academic OneFile. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
There were leaders such as Timothy Leary, Harvard Professor, who was helped spread the hippies drug use. He recommended the use of LSD and used his famous slogan, “tune in, ten on, and drop out”, to inspire the American youth. Later during his career, he was fired for being unreliable to showing up to his classes. Leary had a belief that LSD showed improvements for therapy, that the human mind would expand and there would be personal truth. During the hippie movement he was constantly arrested and was known as “-in the words of president Richard Nixon - “the most dangerous man in America”” (Bliss Jim, “The death of Timothy Leary, ‘The most dangerous man in America’”). Later in 1995, Leary was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. And then in 1996, he died lying in bed with his
Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, an only child[1] of an Irish American dentist who abandoned the family when Leary was 13. He graduated from Springfield's Classical High School. Leary attended three different colleges and was disciplined at each.[1] He studied for two years at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Leary received a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Alabama in 1943. An obituary of Leary in the New York Times said he had a "discipline problem" there as well, but that he "finally earned his bachelor's degree in the U. S. Army during World War II,"[1] when he served as a sergeant in the Medical Corps. Leary dropped out of the class of 1943 at The United States Military Academy at West Point. He received a master's degree at Washington State University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950[2]. The title of Leary's Ph.D. dissertation was, "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Structure and Process." He went on to become an Assistant Professor at Berkeley (1950-1955), a director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation (1955-1958), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University (1959-1963). He was officially expelled from the faculty of Harvard for failing to conduct his scheduled class lectures, though he asserts that he fulfilled all his teaching obligations. Another possible cause for his (and, a little later, Dr. Richard Alpert's) dismissal was his role in the mushrooming popularity of then-legal psychedelic substances among Harvard students and certain sympathetic faculty members.
Traumatic brain injury or TBI occurs when a child has a head injury that causes damage to the brain. These injuries can be caused from being hit in the head or violently shaken. The results of TBI can change how a person’s brain develops, how they act, move, and think. It can also affect how they learn in school (NICHCY, 2012). TBI can affect the way a child thinks, retains information, attention span, behavior, speech, physical activities (which includes walking), and the way a child learns.
There has been a debate on whether concussions and head injuries can affect the cognitive functions such as memory. Concussions are fairly common in many sports, in the United States 300,000 sports related concussions are reported each year (Convassin, Stearne and Elbin’s, 2008). Some of the key factors, which influence concussion and cognitive functioning, are age, sex, previous concussions and high intensity activity. There are a few different studies that argue about concussion and how it can affect cognitive function such as memory. Iverson (2004) et al reported that high school athletes with a history of three or more concussions presented more symptoms and poorer memory performance on neurocognitive testing at baseline than athletes with no history of concussion (Iverson et al, 2006). In Moser’s study he found the opposite that high school athletes with a history of two or more concussions demonstrated similar cognitive performance as high school athletes who had sustained a concussion in the past week (Convassin, Stearne and Elbin’s, 2008).
Amnesia, a severe long-term memory loss disease, is caused by damaged brain tissue. There are two different types of amnesia. Retrograde amnesia is also known as backward moving. This is when you have a hard time remembering the past, especially episodic memories. This occurs because of memory consolidation. Memory consolidation is the process of a new memory setting until it becomes permanently in the brain. If this process is disrupted, the memory may be lost (Hockenberry and Hockenberry page 265). Anterograde amnesia is also known as forward moving. This is when you are unable to form new
“Of all the Buddhist groups in America, those focusing on meditation have been most attractive to young people from the drug scene, and it is these groups that have taken the strongest stand against drug use. The psychological literature as well as the literature on Zen abounds in descriptions of the altered states of consciousness experienced under the influence of LSD-25 and other hallucinogenic drugs. Descriptions of these drug-induced states often compare them with the experience of satori or enlightenment which may result from Buddhist meditation. Frequently the opinion is expressed that, under certain circumstances, the LSD experience is a satori experience. ”
Humans’ memory involves three steps; encoding, storage, and retrieval. Different types of amnesia affect different parts of our memory. Anterograde amnesia (AA) is a type of memory loss that causes an individual’s storing ability to fail. A patient with anterograde amnesia is the one who is grossly deficient in the formation of new memories. (H. Markowitsch 155-183) This is an interesting effect, since it is very different from the common idea of memory loss. The individual will still be able to recall memories from before the amnesia, however. While the exact cause of AA is still unknown, there are many possible causes. It is most commonly acquired one of three ways. One cause is benzodiazepine drugs. These are psychoactive drugs that alter brain function, resulting in temporary changes to perception, mood, consciousness, and behavior. These drugs, if abused, can cause anterograde. The second cause is a brain injury, but only if the damage is done to the hippocampus or the surrounding area. Should the injury not cause death, it can cause amnesia. The third cause is illness. This cause is much rarer than the previous two, however. Amnesia will only occur if the illness causes inflammation of brain tissue. However, there is also a form of temporary AA called blackout. This most commonly happens when one gets drunk. The rise in blood alcohol concentration causes short term memories created during intoxication to be blocked from storage and later retrieval. This is only temporary, since long term memory creation is restored once the individual is sober. An example of AA in media would be the movie Memento, in which the main character retains his personality and old memories, but cannot form any new
TBIs can impact these areas in many ways, for an example, according to Spikman et al. (2013); focal prefrontal damage can result in problems with social cognition, emotional recognition, memory, and executive functioning. Difficulties in these areas mentioned previously can cause drastic effects for a person such as employment, relationships, and conversations. For a specific case, the lady that I observed at the Crumley house had adequate social skills, however, had deficits in her memory that impacted social engagement. She had trouble with her short-term memory, short-term memory is a common deficit within the TBI population (Slovarp, Azuma, & LaPointe, 2012). During our conversation together, I had to repeat the topic several times and the most recent comment I made. For an example: (ME) “I love these blueberry scones.” What’s your favorite dessert you have tried so far? (TBI Resident) “I like this brownie, what’s your favorite?” Her difficulties, I believe, are due to prefrontal lobe damage. An additional area that could be affected is the temporal lobe, more specifically deep within this lobe to the hippocampus and the amygdala. Damage to the temporal lobe can result in difficulty retaining verbal information (Ariza et al.,
He continues to have a grasp on language and facts which he, I assume, learned earlier in his life. For example, when his wife is asking him is Reading should be familiar to him and he remarks on the spelling of the city and its pronunciation. He has also retained his ability to read and perform music. I found it interesting that he was able to play entire songs (which obviously last longer than seven seconds) but couldn’t read a book because he would forget what had come before. Perhaps there is an entirely different area of the brain at work in the memory or retrieval of music? As far as his ability to create new semantic memory, the only possible evidence I viewed in the film was when he was shaving in front of the mirror and there was a note to the side. It was a list of things for him to do like brush teeth, shave, etc but I also noticed, dentures on the list. He surely knows the definition of dentures from before but I wonder if he knew how to care for dentures (which I assume are something he has needed post illness) or if that was something he possibly learned to do since his illness and has retained that knowledge. Other than that, I didn’t notice anything that he learned and then retained that information since his