Biological
Perspective
Nicolle Rojas.
The human brain is built
with many parts that work together to create movement, make our thoughts, make
us feel emotion, and produce our behavior. Our brain is divided in three separate parts;
the hindbrain, which is responsible for respiration and balance. The midbrain,
which is responsible for hearing and vision. Then we have the forebrain, which
is responsible for our thoughts and emotions. What will happen if one of this
sections in our brain is damage or it doesn’t work properly? This are some of
the most strange and rare cases, showing what will happened when the brain doesn’t
work properly.
The
first case is the phantom limb syndrome. The first patient is Derek. Derek lost
his arm in an accident and for seven long years he had this constant pain, the
thing is, that his pain was in a place that no longer existed. He felt pain in
his phantom arm. As time goes by the pain went away. But, why does this kind of
things occurred? Why did Derek felt pain in a limb that was no longer there?
His brain felt the necessity to connect with other receptors him feel psychological
pain. The other patient was James. James also
lost his hand in an accident. James felt that his phantom hand was always
clenched so bad that it hurt. So, Doctor Ramachandra experimented with the
mirror box. James put his hand in a box with a mirror at one side, and then he
put his phantom hand on the other end of the box. This created the illusion on
James brain that whatever his physical hand was doing, was mimic by the phantom
hand, making him feel the hand unclenched and too not feel any pain again.
The
second case is called the blind sight case. With this case study, they saw that
they were two types of visual pathways. The two types of separate pathways are
the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious pathway is based in what we
see like: color, shape, form, texture, etc. The unconscious type of pathways
only perceives movement. One patient is graham, he has the unconscious type of
sight. He only see movement.
In the other hand, the next patient, Peggy, is a visual neglect and half
of her world is not important to her. This cause her to only see half of
things, because her brain chooses to ignore the other half of her environment.
The
other case study is the Kapgra delusion. This disorder make you believe that
your parents are imposters and that your life is fake. The patient name is
David, he suffered from the Kapgra delusion after an accident. It was a miracle
that he lived and that his brain had no severe damage, but the David that had
the accident and the David that woke up in the hospital room had something different.
Once David woke up, he continuously said that the people that said that were
his parents, weren’t actually his parents but imposters. David seem to have no
problems when he talked to his parents on the phone, but once his parents where
in front of him, somehow he did not had any emotional attachment. This show how
the emotional disconnection between the familiar faces and the emotion their
faces should bring once an image is shown to him.
The forth
and the last case was an epilepsy seizure. The patients in name is John. John
had suffered from epilepsy almost all his life. The thing is, that his epilepsies
seizures are taken to extremes. If he has an epileptic attack he would talk
about philosophy, and at moments he believed he was God himself. This is an
epileptic attack is full of excess of emotion, sometimes is a sad emotion and
sometimes is a happy emotion. For John, due to his disease, everything make
sense. Every little thing made sense, and this occur because of electric storm
in the brain.
