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A conclusion on how does alcohol affect one's brain
A conclusion on how does alcohol affect one's brain
A conclusion on how does alcohol affect one's brain
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Henry Gustav Molaison is known to have one of the most significant brain injuries in neurological history. Molaison is one of the most famous patients who have had a severe memory loss in where it effected his life tremendously. To protect his identity Molaison went by the nickname H.M. throughout his whole ordeal and case study. At nine years old, Molaison fell and bumped his on the concrete after being hit by a bicyclist in his neighborhood near Hartford, Connecticut. It wasn’t until eighteen years after Molaison underwent a rare operation for his injury. Meanwhile, after the surgery H.M. began to have severe amnesia and could not remember numerous events in his life. H.M. is a mysterious case study which raises questions on how memory is …show more content…
recover from an injury that happened when he was just nine years old. Even though there was much done to help the amnesiac man it seemed to get much worse. After having a quite extensive surgery H.M. began to suffer from severe amnesia, not allowing him to make new memories and also forgetting some events in his life prior to the injury. In their 2009 article, “Project H.M.: Phase I”, Mo states that Dr. Brenda Milner began a “comprehensive assessment on Molaison’s memory function” (Project H.M.: Phase I para. 2). From that point on H.M. couldn’t remember anything new he did and several doctors and psychologist were trying to find out why. According to Newhouse (2007), Dr. Brenda Milner interviewed H.M. and some of the answers were very shocking to hear. H.M. could barely remember anything, from what he ate for lunch prior to the interview to not even knowing the President of the United States at the time. But shockingly H.M. did remember historic events like the stock market crash in 1929 and the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. Henry Molaison was in a world of his own in where he remembered some of the older events in history rather than the most recent events that have happened in his
Hippocampus is a small, curved region, which exists in both hemispheres of the brain and plays a vital role in emotions, learning and acquisition of new information. It also contributes majorly to long term memory, which is permanent information stored in the brain. Although long term memory is the last information that can be forgotten, its impairment has become very common nowadays. The dysfunction is exemplified by many neurological disorders such as amnesia. There are two types of amnesia, anterograde and retrograde. Anterograde amnesia is inability in forming new information, while retrograde refers to the loss of the past memory. As suggested by Cipolotti and Bird (2006), hippocampus’s lesions are responsible for both types of amnesia. According to multiple trace theory, the author suggests that hippocampal region plays a major role in effective retrieving of episodic memory (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). For example, patients with hippocampal damage show extensively ungraded retrograde amnesia (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). They have a difficult time in retrieving information from their non-personal episodic events and autobiographical memory. However, this theory conflicts with standard model of consolidation. The difference between these theories suggests that researchers need to do more work to solve this controversy. Besides retrieving information, hippocampus is also important in obtaining new semantic information, as well as familiarity and recollection (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). For instance, hippocampal amnesic patient V.C shows in ability to acquire new semantic knowledge such as vocabularies and factual concepts (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). He is also unable to recognize and recall even...
BANG! THUD! FLOP! The usually sound of an athlete when they hit the ground after they received and unexpected injury during the middle of a big game. While reading The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls went through adversity in her life so too must athletes who get injured in sports. It happens in sports everywhere: professional, college, high school, middle school, and even in younger age groups. Injuries aren’t fun, but that’s just how the dice roll. Those who don’t go through injuries are blessed with knowing that they don’t have to go through the hardships; however, they are also cursed because they don’t know the feeling of breaking your ankles in a soccer game, receiving a concussion during a football game, or even breaking your arm during
Henry (Harrison Ford) suffered injuries to his brain after being shot in the head when he went to go buy cigarettes from a local shop. When he was shot, the bullet went into his right frontal lobe; the part of the brain that is responsible for decision making and language. Henry was also shot in his subclavian artery, which brought him into cardiac arrest and eventually anoxia. Due to the bullet to the head, Henry’s loss of memory has affected his social behavior by causing him to act less educated than he used to as well as by making him feel uncomfortable around people that he knew before the accident. His work life and family life were changed due to him not being able to remember his own family, co-workers, or what to do at his own job.
In the movie Regarding Henry, Henry Turner (Harrison Ford) is shot in the head twice when he walked into a convenience store while it was being robbed. He wakes up from a coma and has apparently lost all of his memory. After the accident he is pretty much like a child learning everything all over again. He doesn’t remember his friends, coworkers, or even who his family are and what roles they play in his life and in his family.
One of the most memorable case studies I read about in high school psychology was the procedure of removing large portions, sometime half the brain, to treat young children with epileptic seizures. This procedure, called hemi-spherectomy, was developed in the 1920's but rarely performed due to complications (8). With the advances in medicine today, it has become a more common practice in treatment severe epilepsy. At first, though the procedure was expected to stop the seizures, doctors did not expect these children to ever function normally. After all, with so much of the brain missing, it is hard to expect much of the mental functions of these children. Surprisingly, these children often retained much of their personality, memories and sense humor (8), awing their doctors with the flexibility of the brains to adjust after such invasive surgery.
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
I have a long way to go, my memory has improved but it is still an upward battle. Having Severe Post-Concussion Syndrome has taught me that my life isn’t defined based on how high my G.P.A is or whether or not I get into the top ten of my class. I pride myself in knowing that I can achieve the big tasks as well as the more menial ones despite my severe head injury. After all, life is defined by the little victories, like remembering where the silverware is located, and by finding the spoon I found
Memory is a cognitive function of the brain that is often taken for granted. Memory may have many purposes, but most importantly it is essentially a record of an entire life span. From this perspective memory is the most important aspect of consciousness. Unfortunately, through formal experimentation it has been shown that memory is fairly inaccurate, inconsistent, and often influenced by our own experiences as well as the bias of others. Memory is not only affected during an observed event, but there are instances where memory can be influenced after an event as well. There are also instances where memory can be affected retroactively due to personal experiences and biases. Incorrectly recalling the memories of one’s life is usually not detrimental, but the flawed nature of long-term and short-term memory functions becomes a serious matter in regards to criminal eyewitness testimony. In the justice system eyewitness reports are legitimate and can be crucial in the judging process. The justice system was constructed to rely on testimony that is often inaccurate and inconstant in many ways.
The question then becomes whether declarative and non-declarative memory are in fact separate or different manifestations of the same neural process. From research on H.M., we find evidence for the existence of a declarative memory system that is independent of non-declarative memory and other forms of intelligence. H.M. had the capacity to hold information in his head for a period of time, suggesting that his working memory was intact (Squire and Wixted, 2011). Further evidence that not all memory is the same is the fact that H.M. acquired a motor skill despite not being able to remember actually learning the skill, thus showing the difference between episodic and semantic memory. Amnesiacs are able to acquire the perceptual skill of reading mirror-reversed words at a normal rate compared to controls (Cohen and Squire, 1980), demonstrating that the ability to learn new perceptual skills also remains intact. Of the forms of non-declarative memory, procedural memory involves the cerebellum, motor cortex, and basal ganglia (General Intro the Neurobiology…). Thus, non-declarative memory can, in a way, be seen as a more primitive form of memory that is not acquired through the integration and consolidation of neural events in the medial temporal lobe, but rather through learned associations outside of the
In 1906, Dr. Alois Alzheimer discovered a “peculiar disease”. Dr. Alzheimer was an expert in linking symptoms to microscopic brain changes. Dr. Alzheimer noticed changes in the brain tissue of Auguste D., a patient who had died of an unusual mental disease. Her symptoms ranged from memory loss to unpredictable behavior. Afte...
“The Vow” is a movie that encases the turmoil and hardship associated with retrograde amnesia and the classic symptoms and steps associated with recovering and potentially regaining lost memory. Taking into account the information gained through multiple sources; such as, lecture of Mental Health, medical databases, and the personal experiences of Krickett Carpenter, the Vow provides both an accurate and inaccurate depiction of retrograde amnesia.
In 1948 Phineas Gage, an American railroad construction foreman, was involved in a terrible accident during which a tamping iron was explosively forced upwards through his left cheek and exiting the top of his head (Harlow, 1948). He stunned his colleagues by not only surviving the event and swiftly regaining consciousness but by also by walking to a nearby cart. Gage regained many of his physical and mental abilities but remained altered in his personality to the extent that he was considered “gross, profane, coarse and vulgar” (Bigelow, 1851), having previously been considered diligent and pleasant. The curious case of this gentleman with extensive brain damage but nevertheless much retained function has fueled interest and research into the localization of function within the brain. Although the exact nature of Gage’s injuries has been subject to extensive debate (Ratiu et al., 2004), it is generally accepted that a large part of his left prefrontal cortex was damaged, including the medial and lateral orbito-frontal and the dorsolateral prefrontal regions.
In the text, we learned about memory, which is the ability to store and retrieve information. Looking further into memory, more specifically the seven “sins” of memory, it included memory misattribution. This is defined as the assigning a recollection or an idea to the wrong source. A part of memory is recalling when, where, and how information was acquired, commonly known as source memory. A type of memory misattribution is false recognition, a feeling of familiarity about something that hasn’t been encountered before. Although this is more common in people with damage to their frontal lobes, there is a subjective experience of this that occurs in everyday déjà vu experiences. Individuals with neurological damage
According to Sternberg (1999), memory is the extraction of past experiences for information to be used in the present. The retrieval of memory is essential in every aspect of daily life, whether it is for academics, work or social purposes. However, many often take memory for granted and assume that it can be relied on because of how realistic it appears in the mind. This form of memory is also known as flashbulb memory. (Brown and Kulik, 1977). The question of whether our memory is reliably accurate has been shown to have implications in providing precise details of past events. (The British Psychological Association, 2011). In this essay, I would put forth arguments that human memory, in fact, is not completely reliable in providing accurate depictions of our past experiences. Evidence can be seen in the following two studies that support these arguments by examining episodic memory in humans. The first study is by Loftus and Pickrell (1995) who found that memory can be modified by suggestions. The second study is by Naveh-Benjamin and Craik (1995) who found that there is a predisposition for memory to decline with increasing age.