2nd Blog

Nature or nurture, the biggest debate in psychology, which can be dated all the way back before the start of psychology. In the section “Hands”, this wonder was put into test again. An old lady, named Madeleine J. in St. Benedict’s Hospital near New York City, she is blind and suffering cerebral palsy. She had been looking after by her family all throughout her life. Her hands to her are nothing but lumps of meat; completely useless. Dr. Sack felt strange about the disability of her hands; because the hands are perfectly fine with the sense of touch and temperature, and cerebral palsy disease rarely affect hands. Later with Madeleine’s permission, Dr. Sack set up a recovery program for her, in which her nurse would try not to feed her immediately, hoping Madeleine will eventually reach out for the food someday due to the impatient. It did at last. In this case, it indicated that the nurture could influence our physical status, cause temporary disability. The disability of Madeleine’s hands are nothing more than under development of the motor cortex in her frontal lobe, which it should be developed way back when she was an infant.

                The President’s Speech, this is about a group of patient who had suffered aphasia, which is the disability in language. These patients react to tones and visual cues more than the words and meaning of the speech. Even with computer voice, some most sensitive patients would still be able to catch the tone. One doctor has compared aphasiacs to dogs in term of superior senses they have with tone. With my understanding of aphasia, the damage region for these people seems to be the Wernicke’s area, this area of brain controls  language comprehension and expression.

1st Blog Assignment

In the movie Awakening, Dr. Sayer was new to a mental hospital in New York. He is brilliant and benevolent, but obstinate too. As a new doctor, he felt miserable in the new unaccustomed environment with all sorts of patients around him. Yet, soon he found an area where he could devote his superfluous passion to. His first encounter with the disease was with an old lady (don’t remember the name). This old lady did not show any response at first, however, one incident happened, the lady catched her glasses in a reflex-like manner. Dr. Sayer intuitively believed that she is not totally unresponsive, and there could be a soul still living inside the shell. Despite the ridicules from his fellow Doctors Dr. Sayer quickly formed a hypothesis and was ready to put patients into experiments. He found that there were actually many patients with the similar response to the flying ball, this group of patients was classified as catatconic patients, their common trait were: mostly comatose, unresponsive, would catch object flying toward them, and each has defferent but similar stimuli such as music. One of the catatconic patients was Leonard, who Dr. Sayer did the EEG on, which it proved that his mind was still alive within. Meanwhile Dr. Sayer learned there was a new drug for Parkinson’s disease called L-Dopa. L-Dopa is an agonist that produces neurotransmitter dopamine, lack of dopamine would lead to Parkinson’s disease. With the belief that those comatose patients might be surfering some sort of grievous Parkinson’s disease, Dr. Sayer managed to put Leonard into the experiment. In term of methodlogy, I would consider this attempt to be consider very bold, but very pratical, because thing will remain unknown untill one tries it. However, Dr. Sayer was perhaps too bold on the ethical scale in the case study with Leonard and L-Dopa, because he secretly increased the amount of L-Dopa, while not knowing the potential harm that it might do. Fortunately, the drug not only did no harm, but indeed brought Leonard back alive (mentaly) again. L-Dopa was then deemed as the cure for those comatose patients, subsequently they all “awakened”. Later, Leonard developed tics and other jerkings during the conflict with the hospital. Patients also learned that the “awakening” might not last long. So, as the ending, Dr. Sayer was still working on the research for a cure.
To put the whole story into an experimental sequence; Dr. Sayer first formed a hypothesis that could some what like “L-Dopa could cure comatose patients”; then, have Leonard be the experimental group and other patients as control group. The independent variable was the drug that was used, the dependent variable was the state of patients; whether they will be cure or not. The result of this experiment was that the L-Dopa can not cure comatose patients.