teen brains

This video spoke about many interesting things in teen age kids. The things that interested me most were how many hours the brain needs of sleep.  This intrigued me because I never get that much time to sleep because I have too much homework and finish until late hours of the night. I am very worried about this a swell because my brain will not develop in a correct way if I do not sleep a lot of time, and if my brain will not develop then I will be in great trouble. I connected with the people in this video because the first kid was very sleepy and took him a lot of time to wake up. This happens to me almost every morning and is connected to not having enough sleep at night. I also connected with another teen that had mood swings, sometimes I am very mad or sad and then I become happy and bubbly, I don’t understand why this happens. Another thing that interested me from the video where the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) experimental results. This interested me because teens and adults interpreted images in different ways, like facial expression. Teens identified moods such as anger and adults interpreted them as If a person was scared.  All these topics where very interesting and I liked learning about them because I am a teen and this video was about our brains.

what is our brain?

1.    Hemisphere refers to the side of the brain, left or right, divided by a little space.

2.    The major difference between the left hemisphere of the brain and the right one is that the left specializes in learning and hard tasks and the right specializes in the less hard parts of life like feelings and emotions.

3.    The corpus collosum is a wide flat bundle of neural fibers used to connect the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

4.    Pierre Paul Broca studied 2 brains of dead people who had speech impairment and could only pronounce a few words. He then found a lesion in the frontal lobe while performing an autopsy on these patients.

5.    Roger Sperry helped many epileptic people in the 1960s. He cut the corpus collosum so there would not be any type of energy transfers and the patient would not be able to have an attack.

6.    After Paul Broca, Karl Wernicke heard about his findings he became interested in this and found out that speech was also connected with the temporal lobe.

7.    The occipital lobe is the most responsible lobe for vision.

8.    The temporal lobe is responsible for hearing and language.

9.    The frontal lobe is responsible for math calculations.

10. The frontal lobe is responsible for judgment, reasoning and impulse.

works cited

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-brocas-area.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca's_area

http://nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/split-brain/background.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area

notes from class

PHINEAS GAGE

1. Phineas P. Gage is a very famous person known by all psychology students. He was a survivor of severe brain damage. His face was trespassed by an iron bar or a tamping iron. After the accident he fully recovered from his injuries, but after the accident people noticed that his personality changed due to the frontal lobe damage. After this psychologists discovered the brain localization.

2. Phineas P. Gage was a foreman of a railway construction so he was using a tamping iron to move explosives around and an accidental spark made everything explode, then his tamping iron entered through his left cheek and then through his eye socket and finally went out through the front part of his brain, a tragic accident.

3. As a result to his severe injuries Phineas Gage survived but he had a drastic change in his personality. Before the accident people liked to work with him and be close to him, but after this he became irritable and had a very unpleasant personality.

4. After this accident Phineas was involved in psychologists and other scientists learned about how we worked with different parts of the brain.

5.  Brain localization is a term used to explain what the different parts of the brain are assigned to do specific jobs. Parts as the occipital lobe or the temporal lobe have different jobs.

6. Brain lateralization is explained like this: the brain is divided into two hemispheres so this means that specific tasks are just done in one side of the brain. Example: the left side controls the right side of your body and vice versa.

WORKS CITED

http://www.deakin.edu.au/hmnbs/psychology/gagepage/Pgstory.php

http://facstaff.gpc.edu/~bbrown/psyc1501/brain/loclat.htm

CRIMINAL MINDS

Criminal behavior is influenced by both, nature or biological features, and nurture, the environment people live in. First of all I believe criminal behavior is influenced more by nurture or the environment and where you live in, because people become aggressive when they are exposed to these situations like being raped, victim of domestic violence, etc. or being a witness of these types of things. Nature may influence criminal behavior when the person is born with damage in the brain, but very rarely. I think this because I don’t believe a person can be born and be a criminal because they are babies and they don’t know anything of the world where they live in, only if they are born with a dysfunction. Instead I believe that they turn that way because of what they see or what they feel in their lives. These are my opinions and my beliefs of criminal behavior.


After researching I found out many interesting things. A recent study using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that many of the criminals had a frontal lobe dysfunction. A frontal lobe dysfunction has many symptoms including apathy, aggressiveness, epilepsy, depression and many more. This neurological dysfunction can arise when the person is inappropriately euphoric or depressed, excessively argumentative or passive, and vulgar. As you can see this problem does not arise from a biological issue, instead it arises from the way you are or the way you are treated.

When studying the backgrounds of many of the criminals it was found that they were exposed to a lot of violence in their lives. It was found that 4 out of 5 criminals had been exposed to rape or witnessed it and that 3 out 5 had been a witness or experienced domestic violence according to law.jrank.org. These are high rates because almost everyone was mistreated. The other percentage of the criminals where unattended by their family or they did not pay attention to him that is why he got depressed and then was exposed to the frontal lobe dysfunction.

This believes are obtained from neurological sciences or studies of the brain. These studies showed that depending on which side the brain is affected that is what changed you. Like if you were damaged in the parietal lobe it would make you feel numbness, and if you were affected in the temporal lobe your memory would be affected. And like I said before damage in your frontal lobe may cause your personality to change to a less social person and I would make you much more aggressive.

In conclusion I found out that criminal behavior is not affected by biological features instead by environmental issues. I believe this is true because the frontal lobe dysfunction is rarely obtained since birth, and it is mostly created by your environment. Criminal minds are not easy to understand, and every day with the new studies we grow in knowledge of these terms.

Works cited

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/foundations_psychology/90977/2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe_disorder

http://www.merck.com/mmhe/sec06/ch082/ch082b.html

Nature vs. Nurture

Nature Versus nurture is a nonstop scientific debate about what really influences humans…their genetics (or nature) or their environment (their nurture). The first scientist to come up with this term was by English Victorian Polymath Francis Galton. He was influenced by the book The Origin of Species wrote by Charles Darwin, his cousin. The topics regarding Nature versus Nurture are endless some like: intelligence, homosexuality, personality, ability to sports etc. My belief in taking part of this debate is that how we behave and what we do in life is due to what we are surrounded because if we never where exposed to some kind of experience in life we would not be able to portray it. Like people love to imitate Hollywood stars we are what we are because of our surroundings.

I think that this debate should end. Even though scientists come up with more proof that we are all genetic it would be impossible because there is already a bigger proof of nurture. There are twins that have been studied. Twins are genetically identical but their personality traits are completely different. This would be the biggest proof to the world that our personality and ability traits come completely by our experiences in our environment.

http://genealogy.about.com/cs/geneticgenealogy/a/nature_nurture_2.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture#Are_the_traits_real.3F

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-nature-versus-nurture.htm