Schizophrenia

Have you ever heard voices in your head, or when you are tired, have you ever seen something out of the corner of your eye? It's not the most pleasant experience to see or hear something that you know is not really there. Luckily for most people these experiences are far and few in between, but for a few people these things are commonplace. This disorder is known as schizophrenia, basically the person has to deal with auditory and/or visual hallucinations.

For most people with this disorder there is no turning it off, there are a few medicines available, and a few up and coming treatments for schizophrenia, including transcranial magnetic stimulation. Unfortunaltely though there are no real cures for this disorder, and family members of people with this disorder have a higher chance of becoming afflicted with this same disorder. For a better understanding take a look at the video below in order to see that even children can be affected by this disorder. It truly is an unpleasant sight that I personally wish nobody had to go through.

Deep Brain Stimulation

Imagine a world where you are sad all of the time, oftentimes you don't even leave your house because you no longer feel joy when it comes to the things that once made you happy. Well there are many people who are faced with depression on a daily basis. many times the person with depression has no real control over how they feel and so they are offered treatments in order to help them retake their lives. Usually a person will undergo a regimen of antidepressant medications and/or undergo psychotherapy or cognitive behavioral therapy.

Unfortunately though the most prominent treatments don't always work. Not to worry though, for those people with a particularly resistant form of depression there is some help, particularly in the form of Deep Brain Stimulation. Below you can see Dr. Richard Bittar explain just how this procedure is undertaken.

Can you imagine having wires going through your body in order to regulate how your mood fluctuates, it almost seems like this should only be possible in science fiction movies. Well my friends we have caught up with those movies and we are making many things possible that were once only dreams. Let's see where this fairly new treatment ends up going.

The Human Amygdala

That's right today we're going to discuss the Amygdala.

No not Queen Amidala from Star Wars!

The Amygdala is actually a structure within the brain located in the medial temporal lobe. Now what exactly this structure does is a little sketchy but from the information available, it seems to have a pretty big role in the processing of emotions.

Now when the amygdala is damaged the ability of the person to process emotions becomes somewhat hindered. Most notably the person can recognize emotions but doesn't really feel them. For example, a person can be shown pictures and classify them as pleasant or unpleasant but they have little to no reaction to the unpleasant pictures.

Now Urbach-Wiethe disease is another form of damage to the amygdala, people with this disease tend to have skin lesions and calcium deposits in the amygdala which then slowly wastes away.

Take a look at the video below to see what amygdala damage does in rats.

As you can see the rat was not afraid of the robot and just went for the food without hesitation, this kind of behavior can be observed in people with Urbach-Weithe disease as well. Also these same people have trouble recognizing fear in others, as well as drawing out a facial expression of fear. Something of note though is that these people almost exclusively look at the nose and mouth of  a person, when asked to focus on the eyes they can recognize the emotion fear.