Neurology Diagnostics

Archive for the ‘Neurology’ Category

When you experience something, this experience creates a mark on our memory , are generated partnerships, build bridges between old memories and new experiences, and create / activate and strengthen the interneuronal circuits that connect the structures involved in that image-sound – perfume , tactile, etc.. Then in a particular part of the brain that experience, complete and associated with emotions and feelings that are really short memory and is stored until it is related to or collected by the individual at another time perhaps similar, perhaps only due partly to the total experience.

In the subject empathic experiences serve as maps to follow the path to understand the other, your brain gives you instant comparison and identification, but found no similar experience to be taken as a model, the subject is able to recreate empathy from the simple yet profound perception of the emotionality of the other, emotional circumstance and naturally derived. And from that understanding will create real and visceral reaction, and organize your answer. This type of reaction is consistent heals, which helps, which accompanies it. The reaction is based on a non-empathic vision, one that falls easily into critical and non-visceral understanding of the other, more affection mediate the help, not heal it requires, creates a sense of loneliness and helplessness to He who receives an injustice rather than a word akin to the situation and emotionality.

It is believed that empathy, as all linked to cognitive capacity implies a higher brain function, and it is known that the limbic system adds perceptual in character. The close amalgam that emerges from these three systems of brain processing (cognitive-perceptual-emotional) level of empathy arises from a given individual and is worth commenting that the average population does not have a high degree of empathy but a functional level that is enough to identify with the other in situations that are part of your past experiences or present but not allowed to come close to understanding the situations that have not lived by himself or in some cases not even dare to consider as a possibility in their lives .

The classic example and clearer is those persons who do not feel able to face change, criticize or highlight weak areas of those who did were able to generate themselves a painful but necessary metamorphosis, and who actually see strongest and capable than themselves but they can not empathize with them because they can not find in their brains a similar action, and the inconsistency arises or incongruent reaction that could hurt an intense emotional relationship may in its essence.

Conclusion

Criticism from a tie is not destructive emotional and social ties, and the inconsistency of the reactions may suggest a lack of self-analysis and self-knowledge by someone who lacks a developed empathic nature, are characteristics that often occur together.

The solution in these cases, focused on the goal of saving a loving relationship, is that “whoever does not see himself or another” to accept his blindness and try to access some form of psychological therapy that achieves a appropriate degree of empathy and congruence sociable in their reactions.

According to the researchers Luis Moya-Albiol, Neus Herrero and M. Consuelo Bernal , Department of Psychiatry at the University of Valencia, “social cognition is a concept that refers to the set of mental operations underlying social interactions, and include the processes involved in perception, interpretation and response generation to the intentions, dispositions and behaviors of others. “

Inconsistent reactions may involve empathic failure in social interaction or a lack of knowledge not only of the other but of oneself, a kind of hole where the connections are lost or codes that cause an individual to understand the other without taking a rigid posture of criticism or trial. The inconsistency indicates a lack of those who can not develop empathy to accept that the world of emotions and reactions not only as he sees it includes a wide range of reactions, priorities and decisions on matters beyond their expertise.

In general, these individuals believe that only they see the world from a perspective of positive colors and judge the emotionality exhibition of others as a negative attitude, when in fact what happens to them is that they can accept on the other his capacity for self-recognition of their problems as the first step to address them. These individuals tend to react even with demonstrations psychosomatic because of mental incapacity to process emotions.

The incongruity of affect trial proclaimed and issued, as well as the incongruity between what they feel and what they perceive to alter the dynamics of social relations temporarily, sometimes indefinitely, although, as already mentioned, the empathy of someone who is not understood could remedy the defect or at least prevent the inconsistency of the person insufficiently empathetic relationship loses depth and objectives

It should be noted that in general, lack of empathy is associated with a low level of insight (self-analysis, self-questioning), and as you say Albiol and his colleagues, including researchers in the field, the social perception or ability to judge the roles and social rules and social context are similarly altered without the persons in question may even see it, for them the trial is positive, your intention is the best and their perception is the closest to reality. The others are the naysayers, malicious and blind to reality. In other words, by their lack of insight move their disabilities at the other and to continue his life without conflict or question their false truths.

Empathy is essential in the process of understanding our fellow man, to fail or be insufficient could seriously damage relationships.

The empathy or ability to “get in each other’s shoes” is a basic characteristic of human beings, but each possesses or develops at different levels. There are those who are highly empathetic and can understand others as if they were happening to themselves what the others live, and from this high degree of neuronal perception opens up a wide range of sensitivities that close decreasing individual who can not but like, understand each other from a different perspective than their own.
Illusory understandings

The affective-social problem arises, as expected, between those who believe to understand each other in conflicts but in reality they are mere observers or witnesses limited to a situation that had not been lived “in the flesh” can not be for them assimilated or analyzed from the heart of the emotions, feelings and actions of those who actually have it.

This type of “illusory understanding” occurs especially in situations beyond the ordinary shares such as: moves that involve large social and cultural changes, divorce, family crisis, employment decisions based on individual priorities and a series of circumstances that require high empathy to be understood from the outside, yet from the “inside”.

The consequence is immediate and mediate within that whoever believes understand but do not understand, takes a critical stance that hurts who hopes to be understood, who receives a partial theory and rigid “appropriate behavior” for your situation, based on assumptions that are not related to the center of his conflict or his emotions. This often leads to the person in crisis to create a temporary distance to release the space of misunderstanding harmful to your situation.

Can heal the emotional relationship if both people admit there is a mismatch between what you live and the other senses, and between what you need and the other offers or demands. In this process comes into play the empathy of the person suffering but is not understood, who noticing the other’s inability to put yourself in their shoes, you can choose to ignore criticism and incongruent reactions of the person who is unable to itself felt in what happens to others, without doubt the affection that unites them.

The female orgasm could be enhanced by sexual energy feedback from the brain circuits associated with pleasure.

Orgasm or physical and emotional discharge of sexual tension has been defined in various ways throughout the history of mankind, and even now continue to add definitions. This is, perhaps, that every complex emotion – and boy, orgasm, is particularly complex covers for every being who experiences it would be useless to try to confine its meaning in a universal definition.

Female sexuality, in particular, is considered by researchers and JE Morley and FE Kaiser , University of St. Louis, USA, as an “extraordinarily complex process.”

However, scientifically, it has been proved that beyond the subjectivity of the orgasmic experience, the brain responds by activating the same regions in all people, while the female brain reacts particularly given the differential hormonal patterns.

The energy that flows during the moment of climax possess the ability to exert a positive feedback or feedback on the pleasure centers and hormone related, reason why if instead of being discharged as a goal of compulsive sexual interaction and was successfully recirculation through the body in a cyclic manner, provide a greater and more integral dimension of what pleasure means and generates in the human brain.
What do we mean when we speak of anatomically female orgasm?

To paraphrase the scientific Meston CM and his colleagues from the Department of Psychology at the University of Austin, Texas, USA, orgasm in women could be defined, this is possibly a reaction similar to variable and transient intense peak pleasure that would create an altered state of consciousness. Commonly accompanied, says Meston, involuntary movements or rhythmic contractions of the pelvis and cincunvaginal striated muscle, adding in some women even anal contractions and myotonia concomitant lower limbs (tremor, muscle weakness) due to variation local blood flow of the same.

According to the results of research carried out by this group of scientists, while the female orgasm can be induced by a wide variety of stimuli, it remains unclear when the stimulus or that quintessential shoot.

It should be noted that this definition is purely physical, leaving out all the emotional, often spiritual orgasm defines their physiological and anatomical elements.

How to know if it really tastes are developed essentially the same class of those innate? The brain mechanisms, roughly, have been described as the same for both cases. The communication between the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens (NAc) , two neural centers belonging to the limbic system, is the orchestra in the modulation of pleasure. The axonal projections of AVT release the neurotransmitter known as dopamine (DA), a large number of neurotransmitter receptors that are found in dendritic branches and the soma of neurons in the NAc. When dopamine receptors such contacts take place a series of biochemical processes that result in the excitation of NAc. Emotional displays produced by the latter event, are beautifully illustrated by a classic experiment conducted in 1954. This year, scientists Olds and Millner electrically stimulated the NAc surrounding areas in experimental rodent models. What they found was that subjects were able to even risking their physical integrity microdescarga obtain power. Studies of MRI have found that humans also have a great Nac activation when presented with pleasurable stimuli.
Memory and pleasure

Having the ability to feel pleasure not only motivates us to perform different behaviors, but it makes possible the storage of strategies that can be used in future situations, ie generates memory. The hippocampus (HPP) is the brain structure that achieves the above is done. Known as the storage center relevant in the short and medium term. It has indirect connections with the VTA and NAc, which is why when activated, say by means of electrochemical processes to HPP that something pleasurable is happening, this in turn conceptually subtracted from the event. In other words, our body is designed so that the trigger of memories is the pleasure, most likely without any remembrance would not have him.

Depression and anhedonia

A clear example of the usefulness of pleasure, is the depression that is strictly disease accompanied by anhedonia. If anhedonia in depressed patients is not opposed and abolished the possibility of suicide increases dramatically. Antidepressants, among whose main functions is to attack the anhedonia, are made mainly of psychoactive substances in the spaces that increase synaptic levels of catecholamines, a group of neurotransmitters within which is dopamine.
Evolutionary altruism

Why, if the pleasure far from being ostentatious is inexcusable, tends to generate guilt when there is too much? Evolutionary theories suggest that, at some point in our development as a species, not yet elucidated neural mechanisms were created to ensure that all members had on average the same amount of pleasure, which translates as the same chance of survival and thus increase the likelihood that transcend species.
Conclusion

The pleasure ensures our existence on Earth, not only species but also as individuals. The physiological mechanisms that produce it have evolved over time, thus adapting to environmental variability. The guilt that arises in peculiar times, when you have too much pleasure in comparison of individuals surrounding an evolutionary mechanism is activated to ensure the survival of the species.

The psychic apparatus underlying physiological correlate pleasure and facilitate understanding of its origin and significance. Pleasure is a natural duty.

“Life is a constant struggle to maximize pleasure” held Epicurus , who has since suggested to hedonism as the essential machinery by which the human being can survive. The findings made by the neurosciences, ethology and phylogeny have managed to support this premise. Today we know that the pleasure and all that nourishes neural mechanism are the ultimate instruments of survival.
Importance of pleasure

Our brain is designed strategically to particular react to certain stimuli that warn of the existence of necessities for the preservation of life, these are: food, sex partner or suitable shelter available for rest and shelter from environmental threats. Obtaining results in an emotional state that ranges from comfort to joy, it is not coincidence, but an adaptive mechanism. The results, for example, food consumption did not have an inherent correlation hedonic consequences from malnutrition would bring even, in extreme cases, starvation, and likewise, not getting any emotional reward for copulating, extinguish any kind in decades.

Of course, the pleasure has come to transcend as archaic response to these stimuli, the human being, for example, manages to feel much more pleasure, ranging from very tied to the satisfaction of basic needs, such as the announcement of the visit to a great restaurant or provocative lingerie behind a dresser, to circumstances such intangible and abstract as any artistic or romantic words of the beloved.

Not all people respond similarly to a stressful situation, some of them manifested a more intense fear.

The amygdala is an area of our brain with almond-shaped and receives a large amount of information in our environment, for example, smells, sights, sounds … We could say that the amygdala is our sentinel.

What do you do with all those signs? Responds to them by primitive signs thanks to his connections with the spinal cord, such as heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate. This explains that when someone comes to us at night and the fact that our life is in danger, we increase the heart rate, blood pressure and breathe in a jerky fashion. In addition, the pupils dilate and increases sweating. The amygdala has just activated the alarm.
Connections of the amygdala

The signals from the amygdala reach the hypothalamus, the area where corticotropic releasing hormone (HCT), which in turn is responsible for the release of cortisol (stress hormone). Cortisol is the substance responsible for leading the fight or flight through connections with our metabolism, since it directly influences the amount of glucose you should get the muscles.

There are connections from the amygdala that go to the cingulate cortex and other fibers that go directly into specific muscles. Such connections are what make the dog growl, arching your back and tighten cat musculature of the human vocal cords. So when we fear we get a high-pitched voice.

The information is also directed toward the locus coeruleus, an area in the brainstem, which is responsible for producing norepinephrine and disperse throughout the brain. The result? All of our brain is alert, the smallest of the stimulus can make us tremble in fear.

These connections bypass the cerebral cortex, what does this mean? We can not control. Our rational brain is outside the control of all these kinds of responses.

Neurotransmitters and fear

Being afraid is not bad. It is natural and positive, inherent in all animals. What is your role? Alerted to the danger, the defense planning and ensure our survival. Now, one of the characteristics of fear is anxiety and this depends basically on the interrelationship between two neurotransmitters, oxytocin and vasopressin at the level of the amygdala.

When the amygdala oxytocin dominates the person is calmer in situations of danger, while if more vasopressin increases anxiety, uncertainty and, ultimately, fear grips us. Our body prepares for fight or flight.
Fear Gene

Experience shows that not all people react the same way to a dangerous situation and, in part, our genes have much to say. Some scientists believe they have discovered the gene for fear. It is called COMT and directly regulates anxiety. It has been shown that this gene has two variants: Met 158 ​​and Val 158, ie, at position 158 can be methionine or valine. Those with two copies of Met 158 have a greater degree of anxiety when viewing unpleasant pictures and those with two copies of Val 158 to better control their emotions .

In short, the amygdala is the conductor of the responses of fear and its score are oxytocin and vasopressin.

Since its concept and its timing, falling in love is not synonymous with love. Psycho-brain processes associated with such states explain the difference.

Falling in love is considered by some scholars psychologists as a state of temporary psychosis, a crazy, to the surprise of a feeling that overpowers and confounds, which pushes to want to run faster than the wind and eat the world. Logic, reason trial and never could come into play in the psyche of a person in love. As stated by the psychiatrist and writer Irvin Yalom , a leading proponent of contemporary humanistic psychology, psychologists do not want to meet people in love, at least not during the short time that this state away from the clouded reason, because, simply, is useless to try to reason with them.

However, the person who has reached the certain conclusion that his sentiment is reflected in the verb to love , regardless of the intensity of acute and falling in love, logic, reasoning and self-analysis play important roles in decision making and the impact of each step to take. You can retain some impulsivity, if this is part of the personalities involved, but the long term are sought, as opposed to falling in love, in which the next thing to live is important.

In each process, the brain behaves differently, and thus the psyche of the individual, intimate relationship with the brain circuits activated express different behaviors.

The brain mechanisms involved in infatuation and love

According to researchers Bianchi-Demicheli, Grafton and Ortique University Hospital of Geneva, Switzerland, the site of brain processing of love “romantic” correlates with subcortical structures involved in reward, motivation and the development of emotions . This finding suggested that love as a feeling, have a clearly directed toward complacency and is much more than a simple and spontaneous emotion .

In the early stages, when the attraction is overpowering and unmanageable from reason, mediate goals and long term can not be defined, although, paradoxically, is often the most time fantasizing the future. The intense emotions beyond any process of maturation and the words flow without a rationale or strong mental processing.

The behavior of a person in love, Bianchi-Demicheli state and its partners, once the love is transformed into a feeling, it becomes predictable and intended for a particular purpose. The authors demonstrated that brain function in cognitive tasks markedly rises to relate, even subliminally, by the name of the loved one, suggesting a facilitative action of love over many brain circuits, including that of cognition.

During the crush, the brain seems sunk to an obsession or addiction unmanageable related intimately to the idea of being that has captivated not seem to have cognitive processing circuits involved, but emotions and feelings associated with passionate instinctive behavior.

When love calls for decisions

Decisions made during the period of infatuation ethereal usually no real decisions. They are, however, fits with the feet not anchored to the mainland.

The feelings of joy and spiritual well-being confused with the physical excitement and euphoria of falling in love causes, and the mixture of the four emotions up to a conscious decision but a strong desire expressed as a plan equivalent to an imperfect future model of a real decision.

Over time the “madness of love” or transient psychosis, as Yalom calls it, the sudden feeling of love begins to take root on land and only then, decisions decisions or processes can be considered complete brain.

Being loving, he starts to feel their emotional needs, and not only physical or instinctive, and that which should fill in a period of infatuation could become an incomplete project according to their basic needs for shelter, company, projection and joint plans. This is the time in which reality imposes on the imagination.

The left brain (logical, thinking and the benefits and risks sopesante) begins to play a leading role on any decision to take. The vision of the beloved is expanded markedly, beginning the stage of real vision of others and their circumstances. The analysis of the reality surpasses the words heard.

The brain circuits that are involved and are more cognitive, including mathematical, speculative gains and losses of their own.

The right brain tends to balance the logical analysis of the left hemisphere, keeping emotions in a space supremacy over rational thought, until the latter rigidly imposed to save the self-esteem based on unmet needs, and preserve the emotional health of those who may be damaged if not met as scheduled or expected. The expectations are confronted with promises, to the facts. The thought process takes over bottom and emotional figure in a game of self-defense and conquest.

The limbic system, processor par excellence of the emotions, and empathy , the supreme condition of man, mark the route and destination of each connection once both hemispheres participate in the analysis of the appropriateness of that love as an emotion experienced before overpowering.
Conclusion

The infatuation excites the senses and clouds the reasoning but does the cycle in a few months to produce, or not, the true feeling of love, which is based on processes anchored in both hemispheres.

During the infatuation of the reasons or logical theories have no place whatsoever, nor self-analysis, but after initial instinctive emotion processed to become a feeling rooted and projects, such love demands from basic needs of those who love, the reason amalgamates the feeling and focus on the limbic and cortical areas and processing suborticales than evaluating every aspect of that feeling with full power to alter human behavior.

A break of a couple or any situation in which one feels rejected us pain. But where this pain is captured?

The love, by definition, is a feeling of affection we feel toward another person. Now, it can measure love? A priori we would say that love can not be quantified, it depends on many variables, which are immeasurable. However, the reality is quite different. You can measure and is measured from more than 20 years, from 1986, when the psychologist Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher sociologist developed what they called Passionate Love Scale. Using a simple test can measure the love that a person is another. The questionnaire consists of 30 questions and the respondent must respond to each using a number between 1 and 9 as it is agreed with the statement (1 = strongly disagree and 9 = strongly agree). Among the questions included are:

I feel deep despair if he / she leaves me
Sometimes I feel I can not control my thoughts, I think he / she obsessively
I feel happy when I do something to make him / her happy
I’d rather be with him / her with any / a
I would be jealous if he / she think he was in love with / to another / a
I long to know everything about him / her
Him / her want physically, emotionally and mentally
I have an insatiable appetite for affection to him / her
To me it’s the perfect romantic partner
I feel that my body responds when I touch
He / she seems to always on my mind
I want you to know my thoughts, my fears and my hopes
I eagerly look for signs to indicate their desire for me
Caused a powerful attraction on him / her
I get depressed a lot when things go wrong in my relationship with him / her

What is the brain region of heartbreak?

We have all felt at one time a characteristic and indescribable discomfort when someone socially or emotionally rejected. But what happens in our brains? Why produce the anxiety and unease that grips us and let us not concentrate?

Scientists seem to have found the answer to all these questions. Apparently the anguish and pain, in neurological terms, is that certain areas are activated brain that play an essential role in motivation, reward and addiction. To reach this conclusion a study conducted in 15 men and women of college age, who had been abandoned by their partners and recognizing love-recognized remain to spend more than 85% of the day thinking about your ex-partner and not hesitate to return to her if he asked. The average length of time that had passed the break was 63 days.

First, participants applied the Passionate Love Scale, then underwent functional magnetic resonance and observed what was happening in their brains if they showed a picture of the ex-partner and a photograph of another person. The scientists found that all participants were stimulated more brain regions when shown the photograph of his former partner was displayed when the other people. Stimulated regions were: the ventral tegmental area (controls motivation and reward and is known for his role in the feelings of love romantic), the nucleus accumbens, the orbitofrontal cortex and prefrontal cortex (related to the yearnings and addictions ), and the insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (associated with physical pain and disgust).

This finding may help us better understand why sometimes emotional rejection is so difficult to control and why it sometimes leads to harassment, homicide or suicide.
The emotional and physical pain are related

In another study, this time conducted by psychology professor Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan, it was confirmed that when we suffer a broken heart in our brain are activated the same brain regions that when we have a painful sensory response (eg hit a finger with a hammer or we spill hot coffee on your leg). In other words, the physical pain and emotional are neurologically more related than we thought.

In short, there is an overlap in the brain between physical damage and social rejection.

Humans long ago trying to find out why we dream. In recent years, controversial studies have suggested that we process our memories dreaming. Now a new study suggests that dreams also have to do with learning to process what we just experienced.

Researchers found that people who dreamed about a maze game that had just played better the next play, compared to those not dreamed of the game.

“There are parts of the brain that actually reproduce the memory of walking through the maze, and that improve memory and lead to better performance,” said study coauthor Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition, Faculty of Medicine of Harvard.

Dreams have always fascinated people. “We started thousands of years ago, thinking they were messages from God,” he said Stickgold. “Then came Freud, and said they were messages from our subconscious pernicious and immoral.”

Then, scientists thought that dreams were “random activation of nerves in the brain stem,” Stickgold said. Now, he said, “we started to say that at one level, as more or less have always known, do something to our memory.”

In the new study, published in the online edition of the April 22 issue of the journal Current Biology, the researchers asked 99 subjects to play a video game they had to find their way through a maze with the help of a three-dimensional description of it.
Participants then stayed awake for two hours, or took a nap. They played the maze game again five hours later.

Four participants reported having dreamed of the maze during nap time. They were among the most improved when they played the maze after the second time, ten times better than the others who took naps.

Then those who had dreams, what they learned while dreaming? It is not entirely clear how dreams are connected with the experience of playing the maze game, but Stickgold thinks “the process of dream reflects an underlying brain activity” that determines “which means the learning experience, learning how to do better “.

Another mystery: why the maze dreamed so few people? Less than ten percent of those who took naps did. In contrast, Stickgold said, about 86 percent of those who played a game of ski racing in the Alps dreamed it. Perhaps the game “is not sufficiently rich or attractive,” he said. He said that future research will try to find out why.

But for now, at least one brain researcher familiar with the study was unimpressed with the findings. “There is no convincing evidence that sleep has no effect on memory consolidation,” said Irwin Feinberg, professor resident who studies sleep at the University of California, Davis. Sleep is not clearly necessary for people to remember things he said.

But Stickgold says this is a misunderstanding of their research. “Nobody in the field suggests that we must sleep to learn things or retain memories,” he said.