The Unconscious brain

The brain is a very mysterious thing. It causes people to love, hate, and discover many interesting things. The brain can also go into its own world. When I say a brain can go into its own world I mean it can slip into a coma or worse a vegetative state. When brains go into a coma it is in a deep unconscious state. Comas are usually caused by illnesses or traumatic brain injuries to the head and brain. Comas usually last up to six weeks, and when the person wakes up from it they usually regain normal bodily function. We know that people in a coma are sleeping, but unlike everyone else when they go to sleep people in a coma can not be woken up. People in a coma also can not respond to any form of stimulation.

Doctors use the Glasgow Coma Scale to determine how severe a case of coma a person has. This scale reads the persons neurological brain function, and assesses the level of consciousness a person is at. If a person scores a 15 on the scale then they are almost normal and probably have minimal brain damage. There is another scale that is used called the Rancho Los Amigos Scale. This scale is used within the first weeks or months of the brain injury and assesses the coma patient’s progress toward recovery.

But since the brain is in a state that is similar to sleep does it unconsciously respond to stimulations? There should be a study in which doctors use MRI to scan the brain to look at the different levels of response a brain has while in a coma. There should be some activity in the brain while in a coma, even if the person is unable to respond to outside stimulus. As long as a person is alive the brain should still have activity occurring within it. MRI’s can be taken of a person who is in a coma to show how much or how little brain activity they have, and if there is some part of the brain that responds to stimulus while unconscious.

It is imperative for patients to be absolutely still when having an MRI. Since people who are in a coma are not prone to movement it would not be hard to study their brains. There should be scans for coma patients whose families are willing to let them participate in the study. The patients should be in the MRI machines and have different types of stimuli administered to them. Since the brains of patients in a coma are not fully asleep, but just merely in a deep state of unconsciousness. The different types of stimuli that could be administered to the patients in a coma could be the voices of a family member of significant person in their life. The sound of something that could cause fear in a person, such as a scream, or sudden loud noise could be a stimulus. Another stimulus could be causing pain to a sensitive area of the body. The pain of course would not be intolerable, but jus enough to cause a reaction to the nerves of a normal person. Like the pricking of a finger or pinching of a foot. All of these stimuli to a person should cause the brain to respond in some kind of way.

There have also been studies done on the brain activity of people sleeping. Many people show brain activity in the rapid eye movement stages of sleep, also known as REM sleep. I believe that if there can be brain activity in the deepest parts of sleep then, there can also be brain activity in some and maybe even the smallest parts of the brain during a coma.
In the experiment that I am thinking of the MRI scans of the brain should be able to reveal to doctors what goes on exactly in the brain of a patient in a coma and how well it is functioning at different levels of consciousness. Maybe if there is a way to treat comas from within the brain then there could be a prevention of coma patients going into a vegetative state. A coma is diagnosed as an irreversible sleep, but with the way things are being discovered and inventions being made there might one day be a medicine or treatment to make coma patients recover faster.

I do not know why I have such an interest in the brain in a coma, but I think the brain is the most interesting thing in the human body. The brain is the most powerful and mind boggling thing. It is capable of giving people the ideas of inventing machines like MRI’s that can look inside of another human beings and view their brain. Humans are the most intelligent beings on the planet so their brains in my opinion are always functioning, until death of course. Since a patient in a coma is not dead there is always going to be some brain activity. Maybe we have not had the right person to invent the right machine to specifically see what happens when the brain is at maybe one of its weakest points.

MRI AND BRAIN SCANNING TECHNOLOGY

There have been many changes over the centuries in the way doctors diagnosis and treat their patients. Every year, the technology that is available to doctors that helps them better treat their patients and their illnesses. ADHD is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a common learning disability that affects many children. Prosodic processing in humans is speech recognition and understanding of what is being said. Doctors are now using MRI’s to look at how the brain responds to different things people experience in life, and the developing brains of children. Prosodic processing and ADHD are two things that many children experience in their developmental years.

MRI’s or magnetic resonance imaging provides pictures of the brain and other organs inside the body without taking X-rays. These machines have been able to give doctors images of what parts of the brain are working when certain behaviors are being expressed. In most of the studies the doctors used BOLD fMRI’s, which is blood oxygenation level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging. Some doctors would argue the findings of the study, because of what a MRI picks up on a scan, and how effective they are with the limitations they do have. MRI’s are very sensitive to even the slightest movement during scanning.

Doctors mostly used the BOLD fMRI’s to look at the brains of children with ADHD. They tried to find children that could represent every child that could possibly have the disorder, and they even followed some patients from their childhood into adulthood to study the lasting effects of ADHD and their brains. The total size cerebral volume of ADHD patients is approximately 5 percent smaller than age and gender matched control subjects (Giedd para 5).The corpus callosum is a broad, thick band running from side to side of the brain, and consists of millions and millions of nerve fibers. In many of the ADHD patients studied the corpus callosum was generally found to be smaller. The frontal region of the brain was also found to be slightly asymmetrical, with the right frontal region smaller in boys scanned with ADHD. Most of the images taken of different patients with ADHD found that they did have slightly smaller areas of their brain that were used for different tasks. MRI, as of right now, is not used to diagnose a child as having ADHD or not. Some children may have a history of ADHD symptoms, and not show the usual symptoms on a brain scan. Other children may, in a brain scan have activity that is constant with an ADHD brain and not show symptoms of the disease (Giedd para 21).

The second article is a lab report of a study done on children that is usually tested in adults for speech recognition, also called prosodic processing. Doctors have concluded that children can use prosodic processing from infancy to assist them in decoding words and sentences. There was a study conducted of 284 children from the ages of 5 to 18, where they had their brains scanned to reveal multiple regions of their brain, and note changes in these regions as different task were given to them. Such as decoding a target sentence what was repeated at a low frequency pitch. Prosodic processing can either be cued emotionally, linguistically or via sentence structure. The imaging done revealed that different parts of the brain were responsible for sentence recognition in different age groups. There were similar areas of the brain that responded to the sentence recognition task, but in different age groups of children. Frontal regions of the brain in most of the subjects did not show much activity.

Both of these articles give details on research of two things that affect children, and the way a child learns. Since the use of MRI is not harmful to children because of its lack of ionizing radiation and capacity to provide exquisite anatomical detail, it is a great help to doctors who study their brains. Doctors have been able to see how the brain functions in patients with ADHD, and can start to make an improvement in the way they look for and treat this disease. Doctors still have to study the brain in children a little longer to find out exactly how their brains work and are able to use prosodic processing with learning.

Giedd, Jay N., Johnathan Blumenthal, Elizabeth Molly, and F. Xavier Castellanos. "Brain Imaging of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 931 (2001). 12 Feb 2006 .

Plante, Elena, Scott K. Holland, and Vince J. Schmithorst. "Prosodic Processing By Children: An fMRI Study." Children's ospital Research foundation, The Unviersity of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH USA (2005). 12 Feb 2006 .

New Ways to Fuel Cars

Do you ever think about what would happen if the earth ever ran out of petroleum oil for gasoline? That is something that I think about. “Can ethanol replace oil?” is a blog I found when I was surfing the internet one day. There is talk that this new product can and maybe will one day replace oil used in everyday vehicles. Maybe I was not the only person who was thinking about the end of earth’s oil, because scientist and car manufacturers have thought of an alterative to using petroleum gasoline.

In stead of using gasoline to fuel cars, scientists are trying to use ethanol. The use of ethanol is not but so much better than using gasoline, but it can be produced from corn or sugar cane. There is so much of a need for new ways to fuel cars that researchers and scientist have turned to the environment for new alternatives. Car manufacturers are making cars that are called “flex-fuel” vehicles. These vehicles can run on 85 percent ethanol gas which is called E85. The development of a new way to fuel cars is a big discovery because the earth’s supply of fossil fuels will one day be depleted if they are continually used for fueling cars, and other machines that humans use for everyday life.

The United States is the world’s largest consumer of oil. We consume three hundred times more than China who is second in oil consumption in the world. I know it is a privilege to live in the United States, but we are sucking the world dry of its natural resources. When making a mental picture in my head of what the United States is compared to the rest of the world, I imagine the U.S. as this big bully, who threatens other countries and who takes what it wants without caring if the other countries in the world need anything. I know it is a silly thing to say, but when looking at a statistic like the oil consumption in the United States, we are bullies. Now that there is a concern for how much natural resources are being used we want to step in the picture of historical events and come up with remedies to problems that we had a major hand in causing.

General Motors is now launching a campaign that says “Live Green Go Yellow”. This is its campaign to promote their new line of cars that run on E85 ethanol. These cars are supposed to lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduce dependence on petroleum, reduce smog, and improve vehicle performance. GM is making all of their 2006 model cars E85 fuel efficient, but they have later model cars that are capable of using the new fuel. Even though GM is the leading automaker that is promoting the use of E85 ethanol, there are other automakers that are trying to manufacture flexible fuel vehicles such as, Chrysler, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and Nissan.

There are different types of ethanol. There is E10, E20, and E30, but for now in the early days of research and trials automakers want to stick with the use of E85 for their vehicles. As of right now there are still not many E85 ethanol gas stations. There are only about 600 stations in the United States that offer E85 ethanol, but the number is steadily going up. The price of E85 varies, but when gas prices went up in September 2005, E85 ethanol was 60 cents cheaper. That is a lot of money when you are talking about gas. So now when you are thinking about buying a new car, there are more things to thing about other than the price, and look of a car. The type of fuel used is now a big issue when choosing a new car to drive, because we all want the best for our selves and the environment.