Discussions of the how the brain works.
Empathy is the ability to vicariously feel what another person is experiencing, while sympathy is the ability to understand what another person is going through. The medical profession has many people who care deeply about their patients. I think this is a fair assumption, even though there may be some who are in the field […]
I Love Books I have books all over the house. When I get interested in something, I buy all the books I can find about the subject. Sometimes, when I read a book that references other books, I must get those books as well. For instance, I remember reading The Art of Hunger, a book […]
My mother got a brand new VW bug in the early 1960s. It was shiny and red. I particularly remember one bright sunny day. I had just gotten a pair of binoculars, and to try them out, I pointed its gaze to Mom’s car parked on the street. I can still see the sparkling red […]
My interest in mental illness and diagnosis stems from the fact that my brother is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. In my attempt to discover more about the process of diagnosis, I have written several posts on the subject: Diagnosis, the Beginning; Diagnosis (dx) Basics; Diagnosis and Mental Health; Stamp Collecting (about taxonomy); Autism Diagnosis […]
First reaction When I first heard of this malady a couple of days ago, I must admit, it appealed to my macabre sense of humor, especially when Wikipedia[1] described Americans afflicted with strokes speaking with English accents after recovery, a Norwegian shrapnel victim in 1941 suddenly speaking with a German accent, and so on. It […]
In this month’s Scientific American (May 2013), there is an article called ‘Seeds of Dementia’ by Lary C. Walker and Mathias Juker. Without going into detail, Walker and Juker, through their research, became reasonably certain that mis-folded amyloid beta (Aβ) proteins provide the point around which larger masses of Aβ proteins aggregate, causing synapses to clog […]
This is a photograph of me as a kid. Actually, it is a photograph from one of my family’s 8mm home movies, which was converted to videotape, played back on a raster television monitor and paused on this frame. I don’t remember what I was feeling at that particular moment and request your assistance in […]
Review of Part 1: Empirical Evidence Relating Emotion and Expression I briefly reviewed Charles Darwin’s book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In this fascinating account, Darwin established that expressions are related to mental states and that the nervous system acts on the body in response to environmental stimuli. Through his observations, […]
My brother is nonverbal, autistic and very low functioning. I don’t know if I will ever be able to communicate with him on any level but the most basic, i.e., Food=Good, No Food=Not Good. Thought Experiment If it is true that every person has a mental state of some kind, and that mental states are reflected in […]
