So what have we learned, well, the human brain has changed and has been enriched throughout the years of our existence. We also have learned that we carry the baggage of animal behavior, and it affects the way we think, feel, act, and love.
“Stress and Emotion”
Everything that we feel in our bodies is produced by the brain. Our emotions, personality, love, and hate, they are all mediated by the brain. Since emotions do not have there own separate parts in our brain, it has been very difficult to pinpoint where emotions come from. There is only one emotion so far that we know of that we can locate where it originates from, and that’s anxiety. One of anxieties chief byproduct is nervousness. Nervousness is the imbalance between the frontal cortex and the limbic system. The way that we found this emotion in our brain was completely accidental.
Phineas Gage was an intelligent, well balanced man. He was a modest and good, hard worker.
He was part of a team that laid out tracks for railroad cars. One day, as he had a fight with another worker over his girlfriend, he got into a terrible accident. A steel rod had been driven through his cheek and up his skull. He suffered damage to the part of the brain that is between the limbic system and the frontal cortex. So now, he is unable to have controlled emotions. You see, the brain is like a group of good railroad layers, everyone works together to get one thing accomplished. The limbic system passes information to the frontal cortex, and normally the two systems keep thought and emotions on an equilibrium. But after his accident, Phineas was unable to control any of his thoughts or emotions. His limbic system was free without any restrictions that the frontal cortex might have given. The reason why he might have felt very little pain during his accident was because normally, pain is sent up the central nervous system to the brain, and Substance P is then passed through the synapses of neurons if enough pain has passed through the brain. There are endorphins that lessen pain in our bodies, they are released as soon as our brain senses any sort of pain. We can also sort of “block out” pain by thinking that something makes it better. For instance, we may think that drinking water eases pain, when in actuality it has no medical purposes what so ever. There is also a drug called morphine that blocks out the Substance P from ever reacting in our brains. Edward Williams was Phineas’ doctor when he came to town that day. After examination, Dr. Williams had stated that he had severely severed the frontal cortex from the limbic system. The wound was so bad that the doctor was able to touch his two hands while they were inside of Phineas’ skull. This completely changed his life. After recovering, he faced many new changes altogether. His words were pathetic, he slurred when he spoke, he was wild and uncontrollable, he cried often and he also screamed intensely. Basically, he let all his feeling out at any given moment. What happened to him? Well, once the connection between the limbic system and the frontal cortex is gone, the limbic system then allows information and emotions to pass through the brain freely, and everything is basically uncensored by the frontal cortex. Beating all the odds he survived, but only physically. He never recovered intellectually or emotionally. He lost almost all human contacts, but he had developed a certain bond with animals. It was said by his close friends that he was like “an animals emotions in a mans body”. He died 12 years later, never fully recovering.
Chemical changes in our brain also change our behavior. Different reactions in our brain can be changed by our environment or by emotions, but most of the changes are unknown. Stressful stimuli and anxiety change the balance of chemicals in our bodies. Stress is quite noticeable in our bodies. Under stress, our central nervous system speeds up, we have a higher heart beat, and our blood pressure rises. Stress isn’t a physical event it is critically determined by the environment and by what an organism can or cannot do. We are triggered by the “fight of flight” system. It is decided wether we will stay and take in the challenge, or if we will leave the situation.
Air traffic controllers live very high stressful lives and have high stressful jobs in general. Bizzoro, a French air traffic controller working in Quebec. Not only does he have to have the all normal jobs that air traffic controller do, he also has to preform in two languages, both English and French, and that only adds to the stress. It was said that the early cave man didn’t produce as much as we produce now, so therefor they had less to worry about. We also drive ourselves too hard at work, we try to overcome the competition but in the process we are hurting ourselves. In the wild, basically all we had to worry about was what to eat and to watch out not to be eaten, all the energy came from our flight of fight system. But no during this day and age, our limbic system messages are overruled by our frontal cortex. One experiment that was performed involved rats. There were two rats, and their tails were charged with an electrical impulse, and if the rat spun a wheel, the impulse would be sent at intervals every 60 seconds. But if the rat failed to spin the wheel, it would receive the impulse at associated time periods. The rat that did spin the wheel showed that he had control, but the rat that didn’t spin the wheel showed that he had no control. Also, the rat that did spin the wheel showed that he had predictability. So in order to survive in this world, we not only need good control, but also good predictability. The more we prolong the stress on our brains, the quicker the terminal ends basically die off. The locus coeruleus, when active, releases a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine, and that in turn activates our brain and we start to think. Another experiment was given to the rats, this time they were put into a cup filled with water and they had water wings put on them. This time the object was to see how much activity will be produced in a stressful activity. Bad reactions would be to constantly be trying to swim, trying to stay afloat, constantly moving. But the good reaction that can be produced was that the rat was trying to move as little as possible, spent most of its time just floating. The rat that was had the bad reactions showed sleep changes, feeding changes, and a lack of grooming. So the same side effects were noted as in a clinically depressed person.
When the limbic system overwhelms the frontal cortex, the link between the two is lost, and we almost in a way fry everything in between. Gaba is a chemical that inhibits cells from firing impulses. When the radar went out in the flight operators screen, he became nervous and stressed out. But gaba lowered the firing of impulses, and his nervousness was kept to a minimum. Valium is a drug that helps many stress patients recover. It is a member of the class of drugs that improves gaba production. It also controls emotions from being expressed.
Panic attacks are experienced when all the emotions in our brains are suddenly turned on and go out of control. An injection was given to a patient that has had panic attacks in the past. This injection forces a stimulated attack on the person, and the physical as well as mental changes are recorded. First off, the patient feels light headed, then you feel weak, and the other symptoms follow. When a person has a full blown panic attack, the limbic system fires a overload of stimuli on the frontal cortex, causing everything to go hay wire.
Anna Renaud is a panic attack victim. Her attacks were getting so bad that she was forced to get medical attention at a local hospital. The first attack that she ever remembers having was about three to four years ago during an Easter dinner. She recalls she felt weak, her heart started pounding, she had a tension of muscles, and also she felt as though she had a type of lump in her esophagus that felt like she couldn’t swallow. She received drug therapy, and as much as it helped, she still suffered from minor panic attacks. Soon after she was off the drug therapy, she went into rehabilitation that taught her brain how to resist the attacks. This helped her greatly, but she still had the same stressful job and she was still surrounded by stressful situations. She was also suffering from exacezbated anxiety. This type of anxiety is felt by everyone at all the time, just some of us have it in a more profound level. People that suffer from this consider everything they do in life to be extremely stressful, they try to avoid most things in life. Valium is most often prescribed for this anxiety, and it does a great job in curing it. Anna also developed a few phobia’s, or fears of things. She was afraid to ride the metro or afraid to be in a large crowd. Her panic attacks have greatly shortened, now they last a minuscule one to two minutes. Her first day off of any medications was a bit shaky. She has just learned new techniques to try to conquer the attacks, and she has also returned to work. She now has stayed drug free, and her chances are constantly improving because of the fact that she does vigorous exercises in order to get rid of unnecessary stress. Different types of things you may also do to get rid of stress are yoga, faith, and even prayer.
Our understanding of the changes that occur in our brain has improved immensely. All advances do have the possibility to be misused in a controlled way, but the positive outcomes out weight the negative ones. As for the air traffic controller, his wife had another child. This is another stressful situation that must be dealt with care. During labor, she was given a spinal tap so that she wouldn’t feel any pain what so ever, but there was a problem. She had too much stress, her blood pressure rose, she felt bad altogether, too many messages were getting sent from the limbic system to the frontal cortex. After a few minutes of this, equilibrium was restored, and her vital signs returned to normal. There was a minor problem with the delivery, and the child had to be surgically removed, but it came out in perfect health. So the question remains “Do we have the knowledge to control all parts of life?” All we really have to remember is that behavior is a simple part of our brains’ function, and we will have to find the rest out later.
“Learning and Memory”
We are just now beginning to understand exactly how the brain works in respect to the way we memorize things. There are two basic approaches that we have developed to learn about the way memory works: 1) we view neurons through microscopes and then try to determine the way they function; 2) we look at other human beings, the way they act, especially amnesiacs. We are faced with one of the many questions about memory, and that is “Where are our memories started?” Karl Lashley is a scientist that in the 1920’s preformed experiments to decided where the memories we remember are stored in our brain. He removed different parts of the brain from different lab rats and then studied the rats to decide if the part he took out had any affect on there past memories. He trained the rats to remember a certain type of maze, and after the rat could walk through the maze without any difficulty, he surgically removed part of that rats brain. After the rat had time to recover from the operation, he put that rat inside of the same maze and tried to see if the rat’s memory was at all altered by the operation. Through his many experiments, he concluded that our memories were stored in the temporal lobe of the brain. Dr. Donald Hebb helped and also studied with Mr. Lashley. He stated that if more then one fifth of the frontal cortex is removed, that it then starts to have a negative effect on memory; but if less then one fifth of the cortex is removed, the no real loss of memory is experienced. He disagreed with Mr. Lashley, however, because Lashley stated that memory can be localized into a certain part of the brain. Dr. Hebb stated the complete opposite, that memory cannot be localized in any real part of the brain. Dr. Hebb also proposed the idea of cell organization. Wilder Peafield, who was also accompanied by Dr. Hebb, was fascinated on how the brain actually remembered what we do. He stated that memories were stored in the temporal lobe, and he concluded experiments to support this. He had a female patient in which he operated on her temporal lobe. Before any operation, he always did stimulating exercises on the part of the brain he was going to work on so that he could exactly know what he was going to work with.
Our memories are stored biologically in our brain, not physically. In just about every action we ever do, there are chemicals involved that either excite or inhibit our neurons to act or not to act accordingly to the stimuli. When we remember things, we usually first remember by sight, then by sound, and last by the pronunciation of the word. There are many cell assembler in our body. Cell assemblers are basically many cells that are put together to preform a unified task, such as remembering. When cell assembly is developed, you can perceive an event, and you can also be able to perceive that really aren’t there; such as when someone hallucinates something. When a child is growing up and maturing, the first three years or so are extremely important. The important thing to realize that speaking isn’t the most important thing, the more important thing is to hear words that are spoken to you.
Dr. Jean-Pierre Changeux participated in an experiment that tried to determine how a cell will grow when it is removed from an egg. They put the cells in a slide with no sort of other interference what so ever. Some of them grew and became healthy, and the minority of them died. He then added some muscle cells, and since they are long muscle cells, the cells from the embryo started to become elongated as well. He discovered that movement causes links between nerve cells.
Another question that arises during the study of our memory is this: “Do we ever forget old memories or do we just store them somewhere else so that we can make room for new memories?”
Well, first off, we never lose memories. We just sort of move them over to the side so that room can be made for the new memories, but not all old memories are moved over. There are some memories that stay with us throughout our life, such as smell, skin sensations, and our fears are preserved. We remember very little for our childhood, but what we learn from that period of time is very important to us. We also try to repress some memories, the ones that we don’t like, such as painful experiences. One theory is that when we are young, our brain still isn’t completely developed and therefor we can’t remember everything that is happening. Our brain develops memory with great precision. First we develop the memory for smell and smell, and the last to get developed would be the complex memory areas, the ones that have to remember complicated tasks. Memories that involve emotions are usually the best kept.
Memories are first transferred from the hippocampus to the amegdella. If your hippocampus was to get damaged in any way, then you will have amnesia. Amnesia is a type of brain disorder that causes us the disability of remembering new memories. People that have amnesia are still able to remember past things that have happened to them, but things that happen to them at a daily basis, those are not remembered at all. But they can still remember some things, because the brain brakes down our memories to different regions of our brain. Peter is one victim of amnesia. He was playing a basketball game that night, and a few hours later he states that he was unable to speak, he felt weak; but the unusual thing is that he remembers exactly what happened to him during the time of his attack. Peter was a very smart man, he was top part of his class and everyone looked up to him. After the attack, his old memories are still intact, but he is unable to memorize things in the present. He is also quite shy now, but before the attack he was very outgoing. The hippocampus is equally important in the learning procedure. When a person learns something new, in their brains, they are destroying non-important synapses. But through the same process, there are new, useful synapses created. Sometimes, the deletion of the unimportant synapses will allow us to learn faster. So, as we can presume, learning anything will involve the stimulating of synapses. One common belief is that as a person ages, they lose brain cells. That is true, and yet we get smarter and wiser as we get older. How is all this true? Well, as we age, we teach ourselves how to use the knowledge that we gain in better and more efficient ways.