A Beautiful Mind Reflection Paper

1. The movie A Beautiful Mind is a partially biographical representation of the life of John Nash. John was a genius man with a particular love for the mathematics. At Princeton University, where he was a graduate student in the mathematics department, John’s health began to deteriorate slowly due to schizophrenia. He was obsessed with finding a truly original mathematical idea, and it came to him in the most unlikely of places: a bar. His truly original idea eventually became a cornerstone of modern economics. John married a woman, Alicia, while he was teaching at MIT and they bore a child together. He was hospitalized against his will after a series of events, and was medicated so that he could be managed. His condition improved, but he failed …show more content…
According to these theories, cognition depends on the cooperation of perception and motor systems to allow for an outcome in the presence of a stimuli. Essentially, an individual knows the world around him through what he perceives in his environment and the consequent actions. Thus, “affordance” is the ability an individual to navigate the world around him. Clinicians have described a rift between the ability to perceive the environment and the ability to perform accordingly. This “disembodiment” to the environment in patients with schizophrenia is seen as a defining characteristic of the disease according to some psychopathological theorists. Previous research has shown deficits in certain faculties of patients with schizophrenia. Many of these studies have shown that patients with schizophrenia display inactivity in “mirror” neurons, which is considered the reason why patients struggle to appropriately navigate through social situations. Little research has been done on object perception, …show more content…
(2016) used the surnames of the participants and a singly imaginary surname, Rani, to evaluate the effects of sense of ownership on object-affordance. There were 18 healthy participants and 18 participants who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. For each trial, a participant was shown their name, or the imaginary surname, before the object was shown. There were 22 objects, and each object was oriented to the right, left, upside down to the right, or upside down to the left. Every participant performed the task twice. The results showed that healthy individuals responded more quickly when their name was shown and the object was oriented towards the hand with which they were asked to respond with. There was no such difference in patients with schizophrenia. Overall, the response times of people with schizophrenia were significantly slower than that of healthy individuals. Thus, Sevos et al. (2016) concluded that a sense of ownership is not enough to elicit an appropriate response from patients with