This week we started to learn all about the brain. From neurons to the simple sections of the brain, everything is just so interesting. I'm not going to lie, while sitting in class this week I kept thinking back to my favorite TV show, Grey's Anatomy. When we started talking about all the different ways a doctor can test the brain and its activity, I couldn't help but image Dr. Derek Shepard standing in a patient's room ordering an EEG and a CTScan for his patient who just had a seizure. I remember an episode when one of the main characters, Izzy, was having hallucinations of her dead husband. She asked Dr. Shepard to help he track her brain activity and he used an EEG because that shows the waves of brain activity and when there was a spike, that's how they knew her hallucinations were happening. Though this showed that in fact she was having hallucinations, it couldn't tell where in the brain it was coming from, because the EEG cannot tell a functions of the brain.
While studying the different parts of the brain this week, the neurotransmitters, and their functions, I put two and two together. It sounds like Izzy was having memories, that were triggered by her acetylcholine neurotransmitters, of her husband and those memories were also being formulated in cerebral cortex. I could be wrong because we haven't studied hallucinations in details, but it seems that the lesion on her brain were making an excess amount of neurotransmitters fire triggering the memory.
Another scene you will see a lot in Grey's Anatomy is Dr. Shepard in the OR (operating room) operating on someone's brain. Sometimes he will accidentally touch a nerve and that nerve will cause something bad to happen, like the patient to have memory loss or paralysis. We learning about complex communication in the brain this week too. This means that each neural network is interconnected with another neural network. When you touch one in the wrong way, it affects other neural networks throughout the brain explaining the memory loss or paralysis cause by Dr. Shepard.
I love that when I sit down everything Thursday night for some quality time with my favorite characters, especially McDreamy, I learn a thing or two also.
Sophie,
ReplyDeleteRiveting blog post! I found it very interesting to see how you connected what we had learned in class to something that you hadn't realized before. I love when that happens. Huzzah! I do have a question: Did McDreamy use another method to find out where the hallucinations were located after the EEG confirmed they were occurring?
He did not in the episode, but im sure if it were real he would have! :)
ReplyDeleteOk, first of all I'd just like to say that if Dr. Shepard is accidentally touching nerves and causing paralysis he should probably not be a doctor. But I think it's really cool that tv shows like that can add in little snippets of science so that people are being educated without realizing it. It's so much fun to watch shows like that after learning about stuff they talk about and actually being able to understand what they are saying.
ReplyDeleteSophie -- First of all, I'm totally obsessed with Grey's Anatomy also.. and I totally agree that it's so cool how much you can learn from the show. Obviously it's not enough to completely understand what he's doing but I always feel like I'm not completely wasting my time because I pretend like it's educational. Especially after learning more now, I feel like I will understand the show even more!
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