With today’s world more inclined towards war than peace, many people encounter injuries and damages. Thousands of soldiers, in US military, develop deficits to their long-term memory owing to head trauma, brain injury or memory loss, even if they don’t bear any kind of physical damage. This is not only limited to US military but military all over the world. This can even extend to a common man who might have come across a similar problem of brain injury. In response to this, the US military is funding research that is strategically designed to improve memory by brain stimulation via implanted electrodes. It is believed that this can also help people who have suffered strokes or those who have lost their capability to recall due to ageing. The …show more content…
Any attempts to deal with brain and human memory brings up ethical questions. Brain surgery and high-risk come hand-in-hand. Even the smallest of mistakes in brain surgery can often lead to casualties with people encountering disabilities like problems with speech, vision, coordination, coma and perhaps even death. With this in mind, a person is forced to rethink the idea of getting a brain surgery a hundred times. There is also the aspect this technology being misused. This system in the hand of an ill-minded person can lead to a huge disaster that can lead to chips being implanted into a person’s mind that can perhaps control the person partly or …show more content…
Although brain or memory enhancing drugs, also known as ‘smart drugs’, are said to improve memory, however, no pharmaceutical compounds have been verified to be very effective over the long-term as a permanent solution. One of the potential alternative solutions to this is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). TMS guides a magnetic field at a particular part outside the skull to create feeble electric currents in the brain which help with some learning tasks. However, TMS has a limited reach which makes the hippocampus too deeply placed into the brain to be affected by TMS, making it efficient enough for areas just near the surface of the
The purpose of this paper is to inform the reader about Wilder Penfield and his research over electric brain stimulation. This essay will give a brief biography of Wilder Penfield, a description of his research, and finally discuss the insight his experiments provided and the influence they had on our body and behavior in general.
During the later part of the 19th century magents were used to induce neuronal activity; however, in the later part of the 20th century, Barker and his colleagues illustrated that magnetic stimulation in human motor cortexes produces depolarization of cortical areas (Eitan, & Lerer, 2006). TMS is a noninvasive therapeutic technique where an electromagnetic coil is put above the awake patient’s scalp and then magnetic pulses are moved throughout the brain (George, Lisanby, & Sackeim, 1999). The magnetic pulses and coil combine to create an electrical activity in the cortical tissue which can cause localized neuronal depolarization. Not only has TMS been the topic of many recent research studies, but deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (deepTMS) has also been researched to decipher the effectiveness for treating depression. DeepTMS is when the coils have been designed to create a more intense electrical field deep in the brain tissue. DeepTMS uses several separate points of projection around the periphery of the brain while minimizing the electrical charge to the br...
Wilson J.T.L., Teasdale, G.M., Hadley, D.M., & Wiedmann, K.D., Lang, D. (2012). Post-traumatic amnesia: still a valuable yardstick. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 56, 198-201
Finally, I doubt that deep brain stimulation could restore a target memory. So I did some research. Actually, the result of deep brain stimulation is somewhat random and even though you are trying to find the specific memory, it would need to take hours to get the right
Therefore, they summarize that the reason why Clive suffers in the Amnesia is caused by the hippocampus is not affected. The Hippocampus is a structure that is located inside the temporal lobe, and that is a part of the limbic system. The function of the Hippocampus is similar to a post office used for encoding, storage and recalling memories, all presenting information would first remain, analysed and encoded in the Hippocampus then transmit them to different areas of the brain. In other words, Clive is unable to encode memory and hold information which is currently aware, and it is difficult to form new long-term memory such as explicit and semantic memory. Clive Wearing, now 78 years old, still cannot recover from the anterograde amnesia, he becomes a man who has the shortest memory in the world.
There are many ethical issues towards invasive techniques (open surgery) because people often debate is it necessary for us to move further in the world of psychology by using invasive techniques or why don’t we just start to use non-invasive techniques. This is believed because it is still barbaric to be cutting up human brains just to discover and learn about the human brain. However by using non invasive techniques such as:
The control center of the human body is none other than the mighty brain. Due to its incredible importance in basic human functioning, both voluntary and involuntary, any injury or trauma to this organ will have a great influence on the body and it's capabilities (Burrus, 2013). Exploring how the brain deals with various injuries and damage proves that the functionality of the brain is fitting to make the brain the power house of the body. But before exploring this with the help of case studies, it is important to first make sense of the the anatomy and functioning of the nervous system as a whole in order to understand how it is affected during injury, the functioning of the body that is lost, the intervention implemented for treatment or rehabilitation and the changes experienced.
Brain aneurysms practically go unnoticed and tend to have few to no symptoms until the rare occasion when the aneurysm ruptures. The bursting aneurysm causes bleeding in the brain and then often leads to a stroke. This is exactly what happened to my great-aunt Judy who survived a brain aneurysm and stroke.
Dementia patients must have the right to participate in all decisions concerning their care. Every person in this world has the same equal rights, no matter the situation. Doctors, caregivers, nurses, and even family members brush off the request of the person suffering from dementia each and every day. Most people call this carelessness while others call it freedom and in all reality, it is far from freedom. Luckily, there are many people who fight for the freedom everyone deserves. The majority of "Health professionals are usually keen to keep people with dementia at the center of decisions. Independent advocacy can support this by giving the extra time and skills needed to help people have a voice without the tensions of any other role"
Some people have decided that plastic surgery may help improve someones mental health and therefore should be included in health care insurance, I think this is just absurd. I am all for the improvement of mental health care considering it is very lacking in this country but I also think that until there is more proof to this argument we should not include it in everyones medical insurance fees. America is having a crises when it comes to mental health care and already doesn't include mental health care in many insurance policies as it is and this far fetched idea may not be a good thing to add in for the general public until we have more evidence to support this topic. However, I don't think general cosmetic surgery should be allowed, I do see the benefit of other "cosmetic" surgeries such as gender reassignment surgery which I feel these are less cosmetic and more geared towards mental health.Basically, I generally disagree with the idea that cosmetic
As the scientific field of Neuroscience develops and expands, so too does the discipline of Neuroethics. This new and emerging area of study aims to discuss the ethical applications of advancements in neuroscience. Over the past few decades, technological advancements in neuroscience have risen sharply. Every day, scientist’s understanding of the human mind increases exponentially. New technologies grant researchers the ability to make cognitive enhancements, carry out brain imaging and provide the human brain with a variety of different services. Neuroethics attempts to bridge the capabilities of science, with the social and ethical climate of today’s world. New advancements in what scientists can do, such as Brain Imaging, Cognitive enhancement, pharmacological enhancement of mood, and brain machine interfaces and non-pharmacological enhancement must be carefully examined to determine their proper and ethical usage.
As brain systems begin working, memory also starts to work. (4). The aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid afor I am intrigued by the fact that short-term memory can work independently of long-term memory. While long-term memory can be achieved through the repetition of a fact that is in the short-term memory, it appears that in amnesiac patients their long-term memory tends to return faster than their short-term memory. They can remember their favorite childhood food, but cannot remember why they are in the hospital.
The human brain is one of the body’s most complex organs. It enables us to think, move, feel, see, hear, taste, and smell. It controls the functioning of our body, receives sensory information, evaluates informationThe human brain is one of the body’s most complex organs. It enables us to think, move, feel, see, hear, taste, and smell. It controls the functioning of our body, receives sensory information, evaluates information, and stores information.
Hippocampus plays an important job in the formation of new memories about experienced events such as the episodic or the autobiographical memory. It is also a part of larger medial temporal lobe memory system responsible for general declarative memory. General declarative memory is a type of memories that can be explicitly verbalized. If damage to hippocampus occurs only in one hemisphere, our brain can still retain near-normal memory functioning. But even so the hippocampus is damage; some types of memory such as abilities to learn new skills will not be affected. The reason is because, some abilities depends on different types of memory and different regions of the brain such as procedural memory. Hippocampus also plays role in spatial memory and navigation. Many hippocampal neurons have “place fields” and the discovery of place cells in 1970’s led to the theory that hippocampus might act as cognitive
Until recently, our relationship with technology has been limited to physical and direct command. To get a device to take action, you must touch it, or speak to it. All of this could change with this new technology called, brain-computer interfaces. This amazing technology will not only revamp military applications, but most importantly help the medical community substantially. It brings the possibility of sound to the deaf, sight to the blind and movement to the physically challenged. However, with all great ideas there is a downside, there are many technical and ethical issues that people are not willing to risk.