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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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. […]
Mike always used to slap himself on the head and bite his hand. Mostly he did both at the same time. Other times he would raise his elbow and bring it down hard onto his side. Maybe he was frustrated. Sometimes he would hit himself on the chest and grunt. I think these were […]
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 […]
[Note: part of this post was excerpted and posted previously. ] My aim in this post is to explore the depiction of mental disorders and disabilities in the medium of photography and my personal experience in wrestling with this. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a disorder is an abnormal physical or mental condition and […]
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 […]
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, […]
