I’ve done a lot lately for this study, but I haven’t blogged about any of it yet. I’ve watched two TED talks about Neuroscience and how our brains work, both of which were really interesting. The first one I watched was given by Oliver Sacks, who is a neurologist who typically helps with elderly people in nursing homes who are having mental problems when he is not teaching neurology at the New York University School of Medicine. The second one was given by Rebecca Saxe, who is an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT and is also an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She is primarily known for her research and focus in the field of social cognition.
In his talk, Oliver Sacks talks about an elderly woman named Rosalie he helped who was about 95 years old and in a nursing home. When she was 90 years old, her eyes started to deteriorate and she had been blind for about 4 or 5 years. Sacks was called by the nurses at the home because Rosalie had been talking about seeing things and people in the hallways and the stairwells. Sacks went to the home and talked to Rosalie and ensured her that she was not insane, as the nurses had suggested to him. Sacks discovered that she had a fairly rare condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which the visual cortex becomes hyperactive and creates images that a person sees. Charles Bonnet Syndrome is commonly compared to phantom pains that amputees feel. I enjoyed listening to Sacks talk about this syndrome and how it affects people simply because I really enjoy learning about the human body and why I work the way I work. This TED talk didn’t directly relate to my study, but it was still fun to learn something new about the human brain.
The second TED talk I watched definitely directly related to my study because it was about social cognition, or storing, retrieving, and processing of information about other humans. Saxe did a study on a certain portion of our brain that controls our ability to pay attention. This area also controls our ability to tell right from wrong. Saxe talked to children, giving them an example of a mix-up with a sandwich. The children in the age range of 3-5 did not understand why someone would take something they thought belonged to them, when actuality it didn’t. However, at age 7, children were able to take in their surroundings and understand what people got from external influences. The rest of Saxe’s talk was about how after the age of 7, humans are able to tell what people are thinking and what that causes them to do. I liked this TED talk because I was able to see how our brains work and what we are able to learn from external sources. The human brain fascinates me so much and the tests people are doing to further understand how it works are something that I really enjoy reading about.
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