Family Portrait
I tried getting the whole family involved in my project to document Mike’s life. Here is a portrait of all of us. There’s not much more to say. It speaks for itself.
Category Archives: Neuroscience
Discussions of the how the brain works.
Mike’s Moods
Mike was calm most of the time. Sometimes he would pace back and forth. At times he would grab my hand and take me to a door he wanted open, or to the refrigerator. He liked to sit. Occasionally he would stand in front of the sofa, and fall back. If you were behind him, […]
Does That Look Red to You?
Sharing How do you know if the ‘red’ I see is the same ‘red’ you see? Does it matter? It wouldn’t matter for people who with similar ‘sensibilities’.[1] This topic would rarely come up, especially between two people with normal color vision. I don’t believe it would even come up in a conversation between a […]
Memory
I’ve been told that there are three things that you lose when you get old: your memory, your hair and…. I forgot the other one. Funny, right? Not so much. Today I spent more than an hour trying to remember the name of the book I read about a woman who had such an incredible memory, […]
My Favorite Part of the Brain
It’s the Limbic System! What is the limbic system? I mentioned this in another post, but it bears repeating. Limbus means ‘border’. What is the limbic system the border of? It is the edge of the cortex, a mostly 6-layered sheet of cells that covers the wrinkly mass of the brain. The cortex is the […]
I Really Have to Dig Out My Journals
Looking at this picture tightens up my chest a little bit. I think it was first time I saw Michael crying. It was in his group home. He was always acting out, yelling or hitting himself. Sometimes he would take my hand and try hitting himself with it, usually with a laugh or a smile. […]
Mind the Bumps
Phrenology is the study of bumps on the head. The word phrenology is made up of two Greek words: ϕρήυ, mind and λόγος, discourse. Therefore phrenology is the study of the mind. Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a German neuroanatomist and physiologist, postulated that the brain was the seat of the mind and that specific functions […]
Mind Blindness – Eye Direction Detection
I haven’t done much reading about misalignment of the eyes. I do know that if the eyes are not aligned properly in an infant, stereoscopic vision does not develop naturally. From the picture in the last post, you can see that my brother’s right eye looks off to the side while the left seems fixed […]
Mental Blindness
I just finished The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Dr. R.E. Cytowic[1], about synesthesia. He raised some extremely interesting topics. Although the primary focus of the book is about synesthesia, he mentions the importance of the ‘emotional brain’ – physically embodied by the limbic system – in all aspects of human life and experience. One […]
Synesthesia
This is the neuroscience part of the blog I’m reading The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard Cytowic, M.D.[1] This book is about the phenomenon of synesthesia, where a sensory stimulus triggers sensations by several senses, such as a visual stimulus producing a sound. Dr. Cytowic describes an encounter with one of his friends who, […]
