Alzheimer's Articles

Those articles were really depressing.

First weekly blog assignment

I recently read about heritability in my textbook. Since it is a concept that I don't completely understand, I thought that I should write my first weekly blog assignment about heritability. The book defines heritability as the proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes.
I found an article on EbscoHost about a recent study that was done in Ohio on 2,900 pairs of twins. They were trying to research heritability, especially how they are likely to take risks, perceive sounds, and how similar their religious beliefs are.
It is hard for me to make a connection to my personal experiences with heritability because I'm not exactly sure which traits I inherited genetically and which traits I developed due to environment. However, I do have certain things in common with both of my parents, so it makes sense that I may have inherited these traits from them. I think that heritability is how many of these inherited traits I have in common with other people whom I'm not related to who have also inherited the same traits genetically.
Heritability has a lot to do with heredity because it depends on the traits you inherit. It also depends on your interactions with other people, because these people's genetically inherited traits may be the same as yours, and you must interact with them in order to compare these traits.

Neuroplasticity: Old Brain, New Tricks

I hypothesize that the occipital lobe somehow is stimulated by the spot on the sensory cortex corresponding with the tongue. This probably happens by the movement of the tongue stimulating cortical areas in the motor cortex. The motor cortex then sends messages to the sensory cortex in the parietal lobes. Just as a person with normal vision activates the visual cortex by the action of looking at an object, a blind person can activate the visual cortex by voluntarily moving their tongue. The tongue moving links with neurons in their association area. If moving the tongue can enable a blind person to see, then the tongue's association area must be located in the occipital lobe, because this is the lobe that helps you see.
The signal travels through the motor cortex, sensory cortex, and occipital lobe via the interneurons. As the signals are rewired, they are transformed into a response, which, in this case, means vision.

Nicotine

Nicotine makes receptors in your brain very active and your body doesn’t regulate the amount of nicotine that is released, so that many parts of your body could be stimulated at the same time. This stimulation of nicotine leads to an increase in the release of acetylcholine in the body, so there is an increased amount of cholinergic activity. This makes you feel more awake.
The stimulation of cholinergic neurons releases dopamine in the brain’s reward pathways. This neural circuitry causes you to do things that are necessary for survival, like eating. Having these necessities makes you feel good, so you are more likely to do it again.
Nicotine also triggers the release of glutamate, which enhances the connection between different sets of neurons and helps with learning and memory. So nicotine may remind you of previous experiences that you have had with nicotine and make you want to do it again.
In addition to these neurotransmitters, nicotine also causes your brain to make more endorphins in response, which may give you a sort of high.
Long term effects of using nicotine are risk of cancer, emphysema, heart disease, and stroke. Although one usually must consume a significant amount of tobacco in order for these effects to set in, people are advised to avoid smoking or chewing tobacco because the most dangerous thing about nicotine is its addictiveness.
Nicotine is an agonist, because it stimulates other chemicals rather than repressing them.
In order to better combat the effects of nicotine misuse, you could not exercise. This is because exercise produces endorphins, so you would have less if you did not exercise after misusing nicotine. You could also distract yourself from smoking in order to avoid a relapse. Some people use nicotine gum or patches. You could also do activities that you find pleasing, because this will naturally stimulate the release of glutamate.

You Tube project

I like how the YouTube project allowed us to be creative with our research. However, it was kind of stressful when the videos weren't very successful uploading at first.
It was fun to watch the videos in class. They were all very informative and entertaining. Some of them were very clever.