Brainmask Case Study

When you think of mental illness, you don’t always think about all the ways it can affect you or your loved ones. Even if you do, you don’t realize how much a mental illness can change whoever it is affecting. “The Brain on Trial” by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, is an article about mental illnesses and our legal systems. He explains the various effects mental illnesses can have on people and how the legal systems don’t always take this in to account in court. He also talks about the changes in your brain and personality when you have something such as a tumor or dementia. His stories are true and provide real world examples of some of the effects he has seen in people who have developed a mental illness.

In school, at the stores, anywhere, there are two types of people that can be encountered. What makes these two types of people different is their mindsets. One type has the mindset of a pessimist; they think they cannot do certain tasks and are afraid of looking stupid. The other type has the mindset of an optimist; they always try new things and are not scared to do so. In the article “Brainology” by Carol S. Dweck, she states that there are two different mindsets that people can possess, either a fixed mindset (pessimist) or a growth mindset (optimist); these mindsets are developed at a young age and will influence a person’s choices and opportunities.

I started my education in Erie, Pennslyviana.I attend McDowell High. I would say that we were one of the richer schools were I live. I am going to talk about my first assignment Brainology. I thought it was very interesting and it thought me a lot about how some people have different mindsets.

Have you ever heard that too much television can ruin a child’s mind? Malcolm Gladwell proposes in his article, “Brain Candy,” that playing video games or watching television is just as important as reading a book. Gladwell is using rhetorical appeals to prove that in fact, video games are not dumbing down society. Pop culture is helping to improve test scores and knowledge. In “Brain Candy,” Malcolm Gladwell does affectively use rhetorical appeals to convince his audience that pop culture is making our society smarter.

In the article titled, “Secrets of the Brain” published in the February 2014 issue of National Geographic, we learn that there have been many advances in understanding the inner workings of our brains. One of the leading scentists, Van Weeden, is working hard to understand the connections that occur within our heads.

Students may easily lose their attention and concentration with easy access to such incredibly rich store of information. With such new technologies as television, internet and social networks, people nowadays tend to multitask more often as they have easy access to large amount of information. However, such easy access may sometimes be a distraction. Study report “Your Brain on Computers” shows that heavy multitaskers perform up to 20% worse on most tests compared to performance of light multitaskers. Working efficiency of people, who multitask, are claimed to be significantly lower. The same is with concentration. As a result, they are not engaged in working process. Students tend to be easily distracted with this situation. For example, combining doing homework with operating on Twitter, phone or YouTube results in poor engagement of a student into deep thinking process, according to Winifred Gallagher, who is the author of Rapt. He also points out that nowadays high school and college students have decreased capacity of serious thinking because of multitasking and distraction. Moreover, Tyler Cowen, economist and famous blogger, claims that nowadays information tends to come in shorter and smaller portions and that explains why our generation encourages short reading. Since online information is always presented in short written passages, the web prevents user from concentration and contemplation. As an illustration, Nicholas Carr, the speaker at MIT and Harvard,

I read the article, “Secrets of the Brain”, found in the February 2014 issue of National Geographic written by Carl Zimmer. I chose this subject because I have been fascinated with the brain and how it works. The research of the brain has been ongoing for many centuries now. The history in this article is interesting. It explained how scientists used to understand the brain and its inner workings. For example, “in the ancient world physicians believed that the brain was made of phlegm. Aristotle looked on it as a refrigerator, cooling of the fiery heart. From his time through the Renaissance, anatomists declared with great authority that our perceptions, emotions, reasoning, and actions were all the result of “animal spirits”—mysterious, unknowable vapors that swirled through cavities in our head and traveled through our bodies.” (Zimmer, p. 38)

When it comes to the topic of having a growth mindset, most of us will readily agree that students who are praised are motivated to learn. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of how they are praised. Whereas some are convinced that praising students for their intelligence will motivate them to learn, others maintain that encouraging them for their efforts has a better impact on their motivation.

This video is about The Behaving Brain; it explains how the brain and amnesia work. According to the video, neurons duties are to receive information from other cells, process this information, and transmitting it to the rest of the body. This is done by traveling through dendrites, to the soma, to the axon, to the terminal buttons. Constant nerve flow helps regulate our metabolism, temperature, and respiration. It also enables learning and the ability to comprehend. The brain is connected to the brain stem, which is connected to the cerebellum, which is connected to the limbic system. The limbic system is made up of the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, and thalamus. The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain, where things are

In chapter 10 of Jordan- Young’s Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, the argument that our minds are not naturally hardwired to have substantial differences based on gender, but that social environments affect behavior is made. She make an analogy of human behavioral differences to the achillea plant, which develops differently based on its environment, to show that the environment can be especially influential in development in humans as well. Moreover, there is a point to be made about how this conversation of nature and nurture should include the interactionism approach: biology and developmental environment both having influence (Madva Lecture, March 8). Jordan- Young believes that the brain is malleable through environment,

The cluster six stories were grouped together because they all have to do with a event, major or minor, has changed the author. These events are completely different from their day to day lives. I liked reading Science Of the Right Side of the Brain. Science is my one of my favorite subjects and I think the brain is the most complex and astonishing thing. To this day we still don’t know what it’s still capable of doing and are still learning it’s nature. I feel I’m more right sided, which is the artistic half of the brain. I liked reading about the the discoveries about the brain in this story. I also didn’t mind reading The Case Against Chores. My moms always nagging me to do my chores, but on the other hand Jane Smiley wasn’t forced to. Her

Project MK/Ultra was a mind control experiment by the US Government. The CIA decided that using Lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD for short, was a smart idea. So they decided to try and make people to be easier to “suggest” by getting them hopped up on the drug so that it would emotionally cripple them. Though this might seem a little stupid, it does make some logical sense, but not ethical sense. If you can damage, or destroy someone’s mind to the point in which it reverts to a more suggestible state you can change the way they listen to you. Sort of like hypnosis, but with more drugs. MK/Ultra was dedicated to programming the perfect sleeper agent. A sleeper agent is someone who is secretly a spy. The sleeper agent was used by the Russians

Many arguments in the philosophy of the mind have been made for and against, whether or not the mind and the brain are the same entity. The mind-brain identity theory is the view that the mind is the brain and that mental states are brain states (Mandik 77). Therefore, we can identify sensations and other mental processes with physical brain processes (Blutner 4). I argue, that the mind is not identical to the brain, and the conceivable idea of zombies, as well as the multiple realizability argument, can disprove this theory.

The PBS special "The Secret Life of the Brain" took us through all different aspects of the brain and its formation through life. These five movies taught us that the brain is plastic and is always changing, cutting unused neurons and filling with different ideas and thoughts that you learn from your environment. The five videos go through the five stages of life; baby, child, teenager, adult and finally the aging brain.

"Is cursive a powerful brain tool? I believe that writing in cursive is very important. Penmenship is apart of who you are as a person. I honestly believe that it is a part of your identity. In gammer school we were taught to write in cursive because it is going to be apart of your daily life. Writting by hand in my experience does help me remember things much easier. I learn much faster by taking quick notes, which i can later use as information i need.