Brain

Why is this Important? Because this could be like a real-life version of the film Limitless. tl;dr (Long Story Short) Scientists appear to have…

It still happens today, although not as often. Some people think that addiction is something people can basically will themselves out of it, but that isn’t the way it works.

Addiction is a disease.

Nobody tells people to will themselves out of a cold or a broken arm. The problem with addiction is that it isn’t something that people can see – that is why some have a hard time believing in it, even though it affects millions of people around the world every day.

Addiction is considered a disease because of what it does to the brain. You know that the brain is the hub of everything – it is incredibly important to have a healthy brain so that an individual can, by extension, live a healthy and fulfilling life.

What happens to the brain when a person takes drug varies.

It depends on the drug, how many times the drug is ingested and the person that is taking the drugs. That doesn’t mean that someone’s brain will not be affected by it. Someone who takes drugs often cannot get out of affecting their brain.

One of the first steps in this change in the brain is how dopamine is produced. When someone takes drugs, they get a huge surge of dopamine, and that sensation seems to eclipse all the other sensations that produce dopamine for someone. The brain may get confused and it could replace the person’s hierarchy of needs.

The part that controls a person’s inhibitions in their brain is also affected. The person affected may also be unable to make sound decisions. This is particularly the case with drug users under 25 – especially those that have started taking drugs when they are teenagers.

This is why addiction is a disease.

It rewires a person’s brain circuitry and may even change their personality. Even though other people can’t see what is happening in their brain, people with addiction problems need to be treated by professionals as it would take a superhuman amount of strength on the part of their rewired brain to simply talk itself out of it.

The oven, the wood carvings on your door, and your wallet all have one thing in common: you can see faces on them. They are inanimate objects and obviously have not been designed so that you can see faces on them. There are some famous examples, like Jesus on toast. Once you see the face on the inanimate object, you are in deep trouble – you will probably never be able to unsee it. The whole thing is a little unsettling. You know the cardboard box doesn’t have a face so why does it keep staring at you?

Why do we see faces everywhere?

There are some explanations. Some scientists believe that it may have something to do with the fact that humans needed to be able to identify each other’s face, so in an evolutionary context, it makes a lot of sense for us to be able to just look at a random object and make out a face pretty much instantly. Studies have shown that there is a certain part of your brain that activates when you believe that you have seen a face that is not active when you are just looking at objects.

This phenomena, which is actually called pareidolia, allows you not to just pick up faces from random objects. You can also tell whatever mood the face is in. Your oven may be angry, your cardboard box horrified, and your car may be giving you a big smile. These are things that you will know instantly, as soon as you look at something that even resembles a face.

How does it happen?

Well, your eyes see something, but they don’t process it for you. They just send the information to the brain, and your brain then tells you exactly what you are seeing. Since the brain needs to do this in a split second, it helps itself by predicting what it is more likely to see. That’s why you don’t just see faces, but you can also feel their mood. You react to these faces the same way you would to actual human faces, and while it can be kind of cute when they are a little silly, I’ve found that I’ve had to turn cardboard boxes to face away from me while moving because I couldn’t stand the feeling of being watched.

I know, it’s totally ridiculous. I’ll just blame my brain.

People that are in a state of isolation start experiencing odd things. Whether this state of isolation is due to self-imposition or due to an outside factor like incarceration, it certainly does something to the mind. What exactly does it do, though?

Let’s talk about loneliness.

That is the easiest way to approach the mystery that is isolation. Loneliness is physically bad for humans. People who are lonely are more prone to having Alzheimer’s or dementia in old age, have higher blood pressure and are more likely to be susceptible to infection. It also affects a plethora of other things – lonely people have a harder time paying attention and performing complex tasks. Their sleep patterns are also affected. When someone is lonely, they start to get a bunch of hormones and their system kind of goes into hyperdrive.

Great for our Neanderthal ancestors, not so much for us.

As far as effects in the mind, there are many. Time begins to distort, and people in isolation begin to experience anxiety and anguish. They don’t perform well in tests, for instance. There is an extensive study about humans in isolation – though it was originally about what happens when they reduced the subject’s perceptual simulation, it shed some light on what happens when humans become isolated from their environment.

The subjects, whom were paid for their time, experienced hallucinations and even when they were reintroduced into a normal environment had a hard time shaking off what they had felt while isolated. They had to cut the experiment short because the subjects were so distressed.

Experiments like this have been performed since and they all seem to yield the same result.

Subjects become distressed, anguished, hallucinate, become paranoid and cannot perform tasks at the same level that they could before.

What’s happening in the brain during all this?

One theory is that, because the brain is used to dealing with so many things at the same time, it really struggles to deal with nothing. The brain tries to make whatever information it has into a pattern, because things don’t make sense to it if it’s not getting stimulated. That’s why hallucinations happen – the brain is just trying to do it’s job, it just has nothing to do it with and it doesn’t know how to deal with that.

There is also a social factor. We take so many of our cues socially, and when we are in isolation, there is no way to do that. We are not sure what is or isn’t appropriate – basically, there is no gauge.

Everyone likes music, but many people are not exactly sure how it affects their brain. Yes, listening to a sad song after a break-up is as satisfying as listening to a summer hit when in a nightclub. It’s just satisfying in a totally different way.

Music actually affects lots of different areas of the brain! You use a different part of your brain to perceive sound, then another one to emotionally react to music and a further one to tap your foot to it. You use a different area to look at someone performing music, but you use the same area to read music yourself.

When you listen to music, your brain releases dopamine.

Dopamine is that chemical that makes you happy, whether you just made a new friend, went on a good date or ate a french fry. How much dopamine you get depends on how well you know the source of the dopamine – which is to say, if you stumble across an awesome new song, more dopamine will be released than the first time you heard it.

It doesn’t just make you happy, though.

Listening to music can help you exercise, since your brain will be distracted from the fact that you are tired. The music that you listen to may also affect how you perceive your environment.

If you want to improve your skills, you should learn an instrument.

It wouldn’t just make you better at playing that particular instrument, it can help your fine motor skills, your reasoning skills and even your math skills. In fact, researchers believe that playing an instrument actually strengthens the link between the left and right hemisphere of the brain. That means that musicians may be better problem solvers. They may also have better memories and be able to think both creatively and cognitively faster than other people, and indeed, other artists.

If you want to increase not just your enjoyment but your cognitive skills, you may want to pick up an instrument. You can also find more about what neuroscientists are currently discovering about music and the people who play music here.

You may have heard of the singularity. It is an incredibly popular theory that both scientists and philosophers are still exploring with great care. There are many books written about the subject and there are lots of movies that are based on the concept of the singularity. Transcendence, Her, The Matrix and Avatar are some of the most recent and perhaps most notable examples. All movies approach the singularity slightly differently from each other and that is because, while we have a basic understanding of what it is, it is hard to conceptualize.

What is the singularity?

In basic terms, it’s the idea that there would be a creation of super intelligence because of the way that technology works. Basically, it means that technology would change so much that those that existed before it would not even begin to grasp the concept of it. It’s not like the internet, or computers, or anything like that – or maybe it is that, just on a much, much bigger scale. What we do know for sure is that, when or if the singularity happens, it will be a point of no return. There will be no way to turn back to older technology. According to this Analee Newitz article on io9, we have had some singularities before. The author says, for instance, to picture yourself trying to explain the concept of the internet to someone living in the early 1000s.

Will the singularity happen?

Probably, but maybe not in the way we are thinking about it now. It is, for instance, a lot less likely that you could upload your consciousness onto a computer and for it to become self-aware than it is for self-replicating nanobots to be unleashed onto the medical universe. If they control themselves and can work in an atomic level then the singularity has happened.

As far as uploading your brain onto the singularity, we just don’t know. And then that begs the really important, very old question: Will it still be you, or just a digital copy?

We all know a lot about sociopaths. At the very least, we know what the movies and the news show us. People without empathy are scary and can commit crimes, disregard others and simply live for themselves. They don’t fit into what we see as a society. Surely if there are so many people who are sociopaths, there must be people who are anti-sociopaths. Hyper-empathetic, incredibly friendly and trustworthy, as well as believing that they can trust people very easily.

There isn’t that much literature or studies about people who are hyper-emphatic. One theory is that it doesn’t cause them any trouble so that there wouldn’t be any research done, but that presents some problems – surely if you just trusted everyone, you would eventually get in some trouble, right?

There are also different types of empathy.

For instance, people with autism and people that may be considered sociopaths both have trouble empathizing but in a totally different way. This book by Simon Baron-Cohen, Sacha Baron-Cohen’s cousin, explores this more in-depth.

The closest thing to some that is an anti-sociopath would probably be someone with Williams syndrome. Williams syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is very rare. The people who are born with it have distinct facial features like big smiles, small teeth, flat noses and small teeth. Their appearance is elfin. While people with Williams syndrome have difficulty acquiring language skills and can suffer from cardiovascular disease, they are incredibly friendly.

People with Williams syndrome are very chatty and friendly, they use speech that is richer in emotional descriptions and always seek the company of others. They are extremely empathetic and many fear listening to people having arguments. While they are very friendly with strangers and very sociable, people with Williams syndrome may not be able to form deeper relationships. It’s obviously difficult for them as they are often extremely vulnerable.

So are there such people as anti-sociopaths?

Well, we don’t know for sure. What we do know is that empathy is incredibly complex, and it seems to be in our genes and physical make-up while it’s also in our surroundings.

There are things I remember clear as day. When I walked for my degree. Where I was when I heard about the 9/11 attacks. How an announcement flashed on the screen at my first full time job, telling me I had left my headlights on. Some of these memories are incredibly important, and it’s no surprise that I remember them. Some others, not so much. Why do I remember that my downstairs neighbor had a white dog but cannot remember what the dog was called? It’s really odd and it leads me to one conclusion that neuroscientists came to many years ago:

Memories are complex.

Our brains aren’t perfect, they behave nothing like video cameras. We can’t just store a digital video that we have access to forever and ever. What happens when you make a memory is that your brain records lots of different things at the same time on different wavelengths, so to speak. For instance, say you are standing in a field, talking to your sister, while eating an apple. Your memory of talking to your sister, being in the field and eating the apple are all different from each other. When you recall the memory, you pull all of these ‘wavelengths’ together. You can’t pull one of these wavelengths out of the air without activating another one. For instance, you probably wouldn’t be able to recall what your sister was wearing if you couldn’t recall the particular memory and maybe even what she was saying to you.

Your brain needs to look after itself.

Basically, the reason your brain can’t record exactly everything that happened all the time is that it has to do lots of things! Imagine what it would be like if it also had to recall everything ALL the time. That’s why your memories are always reconstructive – that means that they put themselves together when you are thinking about them and not before.

These reconstructions are done physically with neurons and they eventually start to wear down, so we slowly start to lose memories. Neural networks may ‘house’ memories and as we get older, we start to lose these – that makes recalling memories much harder.

Making memories and even recalling memories is very complex, so remember that next time you strain to try to remember exactly what that person you need to call back said their phone number was. Maybe you are better off remembering where you put it.

When you are asleep, you go through several stages. These stages are there for lots of reasons. For instance, scientists believe that dreaming and sleeping may have something to do with how you form your memories, and another stage of sleep makes sure that you don’t act out your dreams, because that could be dangerous.

What are the stages of sleep?

The first stage of sleep is when you are just falling asleep. You are in a very light sleep mode and you may get woken up at any time and for any reason. The second stage is a little bit deeper, and then, when you get to stages three and four, you are in the deepest part of your sleep cycle. Throughout these cycles and as your sleep is getting deeper and deeper, your brain activity decreases and eventually, you start experiencing what is know as delta waves and little else. There are different types of brainwaves and delta waves are the slowest ones.

When you go into the fifth stage of sleep, you start going into something called REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement and it does exactly as it says, your eyes move around quite a bit under your eyelids. That’s not the only thing that happens, though.

Your blood pressure rises, both your heart rate and your breathing start to get faster, and brain waves increase to the same level as they do when you are awake. When you are in REM sleep, however, your body is completely paralyzed. You can’t move and that may be so you don’t act out your dreams. Despite scientists originally believing that if you didn’t get REM asleep you wouldn’t dream, this has been proven not to be the case.

How Do Dreams Work?

Well, we are not actually sure what they are, so before we figure that out, more studies need to be done in regards to dreams. We already know something about sleep, though what happens in our brains is still somewhat of a mystery.