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.