Insular cortex

Have you ever wondered how the brain works or how it is connected? Outside the brain there appears to be a handful of pink and gray muscles. However, as you enter the human brain, it reveals an extremely complex circuit, connecting you with the rest of your body. The brain contains almost 100,000 miles of blood vessels and billions of cells. It is the consummate library of information, remembering data and processing it as quickly as 11 million bits per second (The Human Brain). The brain is a…

One of the other types of stress is Episodic Acute Stress. When acute stress starts to happen, more often it is called episodic acute stress. People who always seem to have a continuous crisis in their life seem to have episodic acute stress. People that tend suffer from this always seem to be in a rush, they take too much on and tend not to be able to organize themselves to deal with demands and pressures. People who have Episodic Acute stress are often short-tempered, irritable, and anxious.…

The hormone cortisol is a very important hormone for regular function in humans and many other animals. Cortisol is a steroid hormone (a derivative of cholesterol).1 It is produced in the adrenal glands of the kidneys2 and is especially important when an individual faces a stressor.3 Unusually high or low concentrations of cortisol will almost certainly have an adverse effect on regular human function. In healthy humans, cortisol is at its highest concentration when an individual…

Electrical and chemical synapses serve different functions in the nervous system, and the use of each type of synapse has advantages and disadvantages for situations requiring signal transmission. One of the advantages of the use of an electrical synapse is speed, as electrical synapses allow action potentials to pass directly from neuron to neuron through the use of gap junctions. This direct passage and resulting speed of transmission isn’t present in chemical synapses. Chemical synapses rely…

My Hemispheres and Me Our brain’s two hemispheres look alike, but they have different function. This specialization of the right and left hemisphere is called lateralization. In the past scientists learned about this functional specialization of our brain by observing people with brain damage or injury and examining they brains after death. Today scientist have other methods. They can monitor brain waves, blood flow, or glucose consumption in the brain to find out which part of the brain is…

Dickinson, who grew up in a Puritan environment, rejected many core tenants of Christianity such as sin and damnation, and her idea of eternity greatly diverged from the typical materialistic view of Heaven. However, she also did not conform to the tenants of Transcendentalism as her emphasis on the incomprehensibility of one’s spirituality and after-life clashed with the traditional belief in the full participation and absolute knowledge of the universe. As witnessed in much of her poetry,…

Parietal Lobe: The parietal lobe is vital for sensory perception and integration, including the management of taste, hearing, sight, touch, and smell. It is home to the primary sensory area, a region where the brain interprets input from other areas of the body. Because of the parietal lobe’s role in sensory integration, spatial reasoning, and language skills, damage to the parietal lobe can have a broad range of consequences. Occipital Lobe: The main functions of the occipital lobe are vision,…

Answer Choice “D” is the best answer choice. This patient has findings on axial diffusion-weighted MRI, which show high signal activity in the cortex of the temporal lobes and insula, much more marked on the right. This finding is consistent with a diagnosis of herpes simplex encephalitis (HSVE). An MRI of the brain is the preferred imaging study in patients with suspected HSVE. Proton-density and T2 images may be more helpful than T1 images. An MRI can noninvasively establish many of the…

Cushing’s Disease Description Cushing’s Disease is an adrenal gland disease in which there is an excess of the steroid hormone, cortisol, within the body. With Cushing’s Disease the body releases too, much of the adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). This disease is rare as it effects 10 to 15 people per million each year. Women and men both can be diagnosed with this disease, but women tend to be affected more than men. The disease can be fatal is not treated correctly and promptly. Etiology…

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for the capacity for representational memory, one part of the development of delayed response, and it depends on the maturation of the frontal cortex. Trauma victims, particularly children, usually have difficulty with those functions (van der Kolk, 2003). Excessive subcortical activation with decreased cortical inhibition combines to leave vulnerability in regards to the nature of incoming information. As children must develop ‘object permanence’ to modulate…