In the
article “The Next Frontier Is Inside Your Brain”, by Philip M. Boffey from the
New York Times(link is at end of page), Boffey explains to his readers that
there is so much information scientist are still trying to find out about our
brain we can only take it one step at time. He talked about how scientists are
doing research on animals first before going up to the big leagues and
performing these experiments on the human brain. Even president Obama thinks
the brain is so important to try and understand that the Obama administration
is taking steps towards a multiyear research project to gain more in-depth
knowledge of the human brain. Boffey mentions what this project is going to
focus on, in his own words he says “The ultimate aim, probably not reachable
for decades, is to answer such fundamental questions as how the brain generates
thoughts, dreams, memories, perception and consciousness-and to find ways to
intervene and influence such brain activities.”
Everything that he mentioned are concepts that many of us are curious
about. If scientist did find the answers to these questions we would have a
greater knowledge of what is going on all the time inside of our head.
To be
able to know why I had a certain dream three nights in a row, or why I can’t
remember notes from what I studied last night but I can remember the lyrics to
a song I haven’t listed to in a year would be really interesting and helpful
for myself and I believe many other people. I can’t even imagine being able to
control my own thoughts or dreams as well! I think if scientists could figure
out how to do that people would be very interested since it could be used in
everyday life, especially in school. If we could all get ourselves to only
focus on one class at a time for 56 minutes I think we would do a lot better
and learn a lot more. I find the way our brain works very interesting, and I
found it interesting that in the article Boffey explained how they can find out
what animals are dreaming about by recording which neurons are activated during
the dream. Reading this article made me even more curious about what else our
brain can do that we may never know. I think the fact that president Obama is
planning on funding research on the brain is a great idea since we won’t only
learn more about ourselves but we could also cure many disease like the ones
mentioned in the article such as: depression, schizophrenia, dementia, autism, stroke,
and Parkinson’s would be amazing and save many lives. Overall, I believe that
many great new discoveries could come from this research that could be life
changing for all of us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/the-next-frontier-is-in-your-brain.html?_r=0
(picture) http://www.salon.com/2012/09/01/touring_the_brain/
The fact that the Obama administration is helping to fund this is pretty amazing. It's a step forward in understanding psychology. Instead of just blindly administering medicines for mental illnesses, without exactly knowing the underlying brain chemistry and structure, we can figure out specifically what to do. Mental health cures can be really inconsistent, because people's brains are always changing, but if we know how the brain works in these altered states we can make cures way more accurate. Being able to create faster and more standard treatments for people's mental ailments would save a lot of time and a lot of lives for the patients.
ReplyDeleteI thought that this article was very interesting. Mainly because one of my uncles had schizophrenia, and another had Parkinsons disease. Although they both recently passed away, It would have been interesting to see all of types of things that went on inside of their brains(especially schizophrenia. And I hope that Obama does go through with this plan because I dont want people to go through what my uncles had to. These diseases are underestimated as to how bad they are. If scientists found out how to cure them it would be amazing. It would also be cool to control how your brain focuses also. But I think it would be more of a breakthrough for the disease part.
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