The Immature Brain Circuitry

Love is an interesting mock trial of chemicals in the brain. Love’s mock trial of dopamine, phenylethylamine and oxytocin are all chemicals that are produced heavily in the first stages of when someone falls in love giving a person a sort of uplifted and euphoric feeling. The interesting piece to it is the chemical reactions start to lessen after time and the ‘high” is gone. This is one reason why scientists claim breakups, divorces, and other forms of separation is so very common. Now what if an imbalance in the chemical reaction countered or changed the brain in a way that the love never could faded? A possible imbalance between neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine cause a disorder known

Addicted to Love, written by Steven Johnson is an article that discusses the effect of oxytocin on the brain. Throughout the article, Johnson examines effects of oxytocin, the study of oxytocin in rodents, and the relationship of addiction and oxytocin. Johnson discusses the general effects oxytocin can have on the human brain while explaining some general behaviours. He then discusses a study conducted on oxytocin in prairie and montane voles. Lastly Johnson dissects the phrase “addicted to love” and proves that this could actually be true.

This study was about all of our emotions and how they compare to different cultures. Paul Ekman and Friesen did this study to prove that emotions are the same across many cultures. They looked closely at the cultures that have been isolated from the Western and Eastern cultures. They chose the tribe South Fore, they are a group in New Guinea who have existed as a Stone Age Society. This tribe has had very minimal communication with the Western Culture and only see emotions from their own tribe people. Ekman and Friesen chose people from the Fore group that did not speak English or Pidgin, never worked as a Westerner, and never lived in the Western communities. They chose 189 adults and 130 children while also choosing 23 adults who had experienced what the Western society was all about. They presented these individuals with brief stories and three facial expressions to match with the stories. The participants had to choose the facial expression that fits best according to the story they just read. Ekman and Friesen discovered that there were no significant differences between the Fore group and the Westernized group. They both mainly chose the same emotions for each story. The children

Some say, to love is to be willing to die. Others say, to love is to be willing to do whatever a loved one asks. Barbara Fredrickson says love is neither of these. In her book, Fredrickson attempts to redefine love through the biological microscope. The author compiles a variety of studies and research data to prove her claim that love is the product of neural coupling, oxytocin in the brain, and the work of the vagus nerve. Fredrickson presents a well-rounded claim, but there are some deficiencies that hinder the strength of her argument. Fredrickson’s use of vague language throughout this excerpt causes the reader to call into question the validity of said studies. In addition, Fredrickson’s use of first person point of view is a clever

How does the teenage brain develop into an adult brain? Teenagers slowly develop through many stages before they mature, some of these stages can be dangerous and addicting stages. There are many stereotypes about teenagers, for example, "You kids these days are always up to no good." Reasons for these stereotypes, are because teens show their behavior around anyone and it is typically bad which causes people to think that teens are always up to no good. Some teens feel the urge to do dumb and dangerous things, for example, drugs, alcohol, or pornography. Parents try to teach their children to stay away from these dangers because these dangers can harm them forever. Teens who give into peer pressure can be led into making negative choices.

For centuries scholars have tried to define love to a ‘t’. Neuroscientists currently believe that the basic human emotions and motivations arise from distinct circuits or systems of neural activity (Davidson, 1994; Panksepp,

What if every decision you thought you were making, was hypothetically predictable prior to you being consciously aware of which option you would choose? What if your control over your actions and decisions and thus the path your life will take is an illusion? What if free will is an extremely misguided belief humans have? Philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and several other disciplines have spent over two millennia, constructing hypotheses and theories, to then promptly contradict them or trump them with opposing views, with regards to the presence or lack there of, of free will. Hundreds of scientists and theorists have proposed ideas and built upon those to attempt to come up with an understanding of free will that allows for a tangible

In this paper, it will be argued that free will exists as a product of continued interaction between inherited biological capacities and the external environment. The present paper is concerned with finding an intermediary between free will and determinism that is based on neuroscience. The philosophical position that most closely aligns with neuroscientific evidence will be argued to be a type of compatibilism or soft determinism. The exercise of free will and deliberate action will be debated as having their origins in neural structures inherited at birth and that these neural structures provide basic capacities for free will. Specific neural structures will be argued as serving the biological basis for free will, but that these neural structures imbuing free will can change due to the agent selecting from amongst environmental influences. In attempting to conceptualize free will within neurological constraints, the present paper argues against the mereological fallacy, whereby psychological qualities cannot be attributed to the brain and its individual parts (Bennett & Hacker, 2014).

When we think of addiction, we think of drugs, alcohol, pills and things like that. However there is another form of addiction called love. Love addiction can be one of the hardest behaviors to break, because people that are experiencing it will not recognize it as a destructive, compulsive behavior that can affect your brain. In the text of “Watching New love as it sears the Brain” by Benedict Carey states, “As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long -term attachment.” In the romance novel of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet both betrayed their families to become closer. As that

When I saw the images of the normal and extremely neglected brain of those 3-year olds I could believe it. I knew that the love and care of a mother was important, but I had no idea it could have such a profound effect on the development of a babies brain. It really is amazing how something so small can have such a big effect on a child.

This was done by studying an individual called DR who had damage to her Amygdala, due to a surgery where lesions of the amygdala was removed in order to attempt to treat her epilepsy. DR was asked to identify the emotions of other individuals, she seemed to find it very difficult to identify fearful emotions. In another study, DR was asked to listen to sounds that other individuals were making in order to identify what emotion they were feeling, she seemed to be very poor at identifying when individuals were experiencing emotions such as fear and anger. This study shows that the amygdala appears to play a large role in recognising negative emotions.

Although in the past, technologies such as brain scans and the field of neuroscience and neurobiology were not at our disposal, scientists have now made use of them to unravel the subject of free will with a more detailed analysis which goes beyond mere philosophical guessing. By measuring brain reactions, scientists have been able to know that human-made decisions are made anywhere from six to seven seconds before the person becomes aware of the choice he wants to make (“What a Brain Scan Can Tell Us about Free Will?” 5). If our decisions are already made before they come to our awareness, in my opinion there is no such thing as real free will, even though we may have the illusion of

Determinism is the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. The determinists’ view has many mechanical connotations and uses the laws of physics and nature to explain how everything in our universe is planned. A particularly interesting argument for determinism comes from neurological experiments in which subjects are required to make a simple decision and document when they chose while being monitored by an fMRI. The researchers observed neuron firing in the subjects’ brains seconds prior to making their choice. It is possible that our consciousness is simply observing the brain’s reactions to a stimulus. On the cognitive position of determinism, our brains are not as self-aware

Brain development in the first two years is the most important and critical. Maria Montessori referred to this time as of the "absorbent mind" Early brain development is the frame work for the road ahead. When and how the brain develops in the first two years will play a critical role into adulthood. At birth, the brain is the only incomplete organ. The brain will continue to grow through childhood and adolescents.

Chapter 2 is centered on the early attempts to identify the brain’s components of emotions. Key researchers that are discussed are a Cornell neuroanatomist, James Papez, and aforementioned physician and neuroscientist Paul MacLean, who worked at Yale and the National Institutes of Mental Health. Together, this pair of researchers conducted seminal medial temporal lobe lesion experiments. The resulting idea was that the emotional brain is composed of a set of interconnected structures in the core of the brain. MacLean dubbed these structures as the “limbic system”. The function of the limbic system and it relationship to emotion was widely debated by many researchers.