In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi was a prominent neurosurgeon that had been diagnosed with cancer. Forced to face mortality, Kalanithi’s life changed completely. Initially, when he found out about his illness, he did not have the intentions to carry on with his career and life. However, with the help of his family and friends, Kalanithi decided that he wanted to pursue his life and strive. In Kalanithi’s story, family relations and the doctor-patient relationship played an important role because those relationships provided Kalanithi support throughout his illness and shaped him into an extraordinary doctor.…
Margaret Talbot’s “Brain Gain”: A Summary In Margaret Talbot’s essay “Brain Gain,” she discusses the trend and implications of students, scholars, and intellectuals using neuroenhancing drugs to improve overall academic and professional performance. Talbot conducts interviews to examine how professionals and students within stressful demands of college and professional life have achieved enhanced brain functioning with the recreational use of prescription drugs. Throughout her essay, Talbot interviews three men about their experiences, opinions, and motivation for the usage of neuroenhancing drugs.…
The gray matter of the brain is the area in which an incalculable number of connections occur. Therefore, any damage to the connections can cause the brain to malfunction ( ). To illustrate, Kevin Davis, a journalist for the ABA Journal and the author of The Wrong Man and Defending the Damned, provides an example in which a teenage boy’s behavior drastically changes as a result of head injuries sustained from a car accident. Davis writes, that a boy just received his driver’s license; he was a typical outgoing teenager who participated in soccer and sang in a chorus. He was involved in a car collision that caused life-threatening head injuries.…
Throughout the book he continually uses rhetorical questions to illustrate what he was thinking at the time he made each observation, with periodic sentences that tended towards variety in length. The rhythm was broken by the long references to previous works, other authors, and speakers who have looked at similar cases, causing the reader to bounce back and forth between writing and references, the asterisks, extra points put to the side, etc. His use of direct conversation gives him credibility, not only does he know neurology like the back of his hand, he wants you to know…
He describes each scene in a matter-of-fact manner, clarifying emotions and details until his message is obvious. In truth, it is not brains that make the man. It is the environment he was raised in, and whether or not it cultivated the sense of entitlement necessary for a genius to leave his impact on the…
In “Bullet in the Brain” (1995), Tobias Wolff summarizes a whole life of Anders. The main character whose named Anders is a book critic, and the cause of his death is because his sarcastic comments. At the beginning of the reading is about the story in the bank, two robbers shows up and use guns to threat everyone. However, the character Anders seems cannot realize he is in danger and keep making sarcastic comments to the robbers. Then, the robbers shot him.…
In “Bullet in the Brain” (1995), Tobias Wolff demonstrates the story of a man dead in the bank. The man named Anders who is a book critic, but his criticism ends up being shot in the head during a bank robbery. However, the story does not end that point, Wolff adds more to the story about experiences one final memory his childhood after being shot. childhood is important. The different ways that Wolff depicts his childhood greatly influences the tone of the essay.…
Can you imagine a thirteen-year-old girl, who was healthy but had to take her tonsils out go from getting her tonsils removed to a near-death experience. In Rachel Aviv’s article “What Does It Mean To Die?” goes into a deeper meaning of false result on being brain dead. Aviv’s article uses Jahi’s story to prove that there is a lot of confusion between being brain dead and having the brain injury. Aviv uses rhetorical devices, like ethos, pathos, imagery and repetition to persuade her audience that showing a patient with no brain activity seen does not mean they are not dead.…
There’s a Chinese Proverb that says, “Failure is not falling down, but refusing to get back up again.” I really wish I heard that quote when I thought I was a failure, but really was just being lazy. In Carol Dweck’s article “Brainology” a study is conducted on seventh grade students and their mindsets. Their mindsets were measured and studied for two years. Dweck studied the difference between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset students and how they did in school.…
In our daily bases brain plays biggest role, it helps human to grow, adopt and develop, everything that we do in life every movement, think, feel and emotions is because of the way our brain controls our body. In the book “Forty studies that changed psychology” by Roger R. Hock, he uses researches from different scientist and researchers to prove how every human part plays important role, most importantly how the brain is the main controller of the movement of the body. In the reading two “More experience= Bigger Brain” he describes how researchers explained that environment can change the way our brain works and how our body can be capable of develop in different ways. In the begging of the research the author describes the process of how researches created test. The author talks about how certain experiences can change our way of physical and mental development.…
A seemingly normal man sits on the exam table in a doctor’s office. He was just referred from the emergency room of the hospital moments earlier and his wife is outside the door, making a call. Neurologist and author of Altered Egos: How the Brain Creates the Self walks in and introduces himself as Dr. Feinberg. The man calls himself John and offers his right hand for Feinberg to shake. Then, to Feinberg’s astonishment, he sees his patient had “what looked like severe chemical burns on his hands; the skin was actually seared away, exposing the muscle and bone” (Feinberg 2).…
Analyzing “Brainology” In the following essay, we will analyze and discuss the article “Brainology” by Carol Dweck. Starting off by the title, the opening paragraphs, the claim, the author’s purpose, methods, persona and closing paragraphs as well. Because I believe Dweck’s article was more effective than ineffective, reasons of why I believe she could've done a better work will be discussed and explained in short. The title the author chooses for this article, “ Brainology”, introduces the audience to what she will be talking about, it is important to point out that the word “brainology’ induces us to think of a very broad topic which could be understood as a study of the brain.…
In the beginning there was Philosophy; the never ending study of the “fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence” (Merriam-Webster). With this definition, one can begin to question the validity of all things in this fine world. When analyzing both, Plato’s Five Dialogues, and, Susannah Cahalan’s, Brain on Fire, you begin the journey of defining virtue. Virtue is a key term in the philosophical world; this is because virtue means to show high moral standards in righteousness, integrity, decency, and purity. Now, with cross-examination, these two works of art have clearly answered a fundamental question; what is virtue, and how is it carried out?…
The Technological singularity, when computer/human interfaces will become so advanced they’ll be known as superhumanly intelligent, shares the same concept in the book BlindSight by Peter Watts published in 2008. “Maybe the singularity happened years ago. We just don’t want to admit we were left behind” (BlindSight 50). In the book BlindSight, technology faces a new interchange that elaborates on how technology and humans come with inlays that adorn insertions and surpasses the intellectual human mind unimaginably far. The Technological Singularity in the book impacted relationships and the way they changed due to the interface, I think this is due to our needy obsession of always wanting the newest and better technology for the good of ourselves.…
In the article, Vaillant illustrates how one of the men they followed during the study always managed to deal with bad experiences and was one of the best examples of good mental health in the entire study. When this individual was young his mother left with his father’s best friend and his reaction was that this had just happened the same way things happen in movies. This young man also went to war because his father wanted him to be a doctor, so he decided to go against his father’s wish and he joined the army. After he came back from war, he graduated, got married and had a strong relationship with his wife and kids. Vaillant wrote to him to ask him what his secret was because he had always ranked among the best examples of good mental…