Wakefulness and Sleepiness

I remember during summer I decided not to attend school so I could get a job and start working. I applied to several different places and unfortunately I did not get a job in all summer! Can you imagine being at home for three months with no homework to do, no school to attend, and no job? For three months I was stuck at home with nothing much to do, the most I would do was take care of my niece who is 3 years old. She would be the one to keep me active during the day, because she needed attention and someone to play with her. Aside from playing with her and nothing else really, I would go to sleep really late and wake up really late as well.  The usual day was for me to sleep at around 2am and wake up at 12 noon. That is about 10 hours of sleep! And that is not counting other days I would oversleep. Point is I’ve always known that I am not a “morning person”. Ever since I was little, I can remember the constant struggle between me and my mom because I wouldn’t want to wake up in the morning. My mom always told me that I would get used to this waking and sleeping pattern since I would be doing it for the next 10 years or so (elementary, middle and maybe high school). Surprisingly, I never got used to it. Every single morning it was harder and harder for me to wake up, not only for school but for special activities for instance a family trip to San Antonio. Still, it was hard for me to wake up. Then I came up with the conclusion that I was an “evening person” or “owl”. The thing is that it is hard for me to wake up but once I am actually awake I am pretty active and I do not have a hard time staying awake, unless I am really tired. The difference between morning and evening people are related to our circadian rhythms.

Circadian rhythms control wakefulness and sleepiness. This principle suggests that our urge to sleep depends largely on the time of the day rather than how recently we have slept.  I guess that during summer I did not feel the urge to wake up in the morning because my room is actually pretty dark. During the night it is so dark it is scary at times, and during the day if the curtains are not open then no light goes into my room. Now that I am back in school and working also, I follow a better sleep pattern. At times, when homework has to be done I will be until 2 or 3am revising and editing and then the next morning I will be up by 8am which is when my classes start. It is hard to wake up, but I always think ‘as soon as I am back I will take a nap,’ that almost never happens because I will lose my sleep but as soon as the sun goes down and it gets dark outside, I get sleepy, forcing me to go to bed by 9pm or so.  I wonder if I’ll ever get used to waking up early, since soon I will graduate and hopefully work a full time job from 8am-5pm.

In this video Dr. Winkelman explains how our circadian rhythms influence our sleep. This video is very informative and also gives some examples of sleep patterns.

Shall this baby be a boy or girl?

Whenever a baby is born he/she brings life into this world. Many are excited to be in the stage of finding out the sex of the baby and buying everything blue or pink. What happens when humans are intersexed? When someone is born and they apparently don’t fit the typical definitions of a boy or girl, they are referred to as intersexed. One of the most interesting aspects of this topic is that many won’t show intersex anatomy until puberty or even adulthood. They can have either an ovary and a testis or two testes. Can you believe that back in the 1950’s intersexed people were all to be reared as females by doctor’s recommendations and even used surgery to make them more feminine? Some might grow up and feel more feminine or masculine and feel that their ‘chosen gender’ is not who they really are.  Presently, intersexed people are given the opportunity to decide whether they want to be a male or female. Even though a lot of these cases have kept private due to confidentiality between doctors, parents and patients, I have read about several cases in which parents decide to raise them as males and when the individual grows they feel more as a female and when raised as females they report their behaviors to be more ‘tomboyish’.

I want to talk about J and her story. Her parents decided to raise her as a male after doing surgery on her to look more on the masculine side. Since she was a little boy, she always knew she was different because she felt drawn to females as friends and as she grew older she felt attracted to males but not so much as “friends” she would say. When her puberty stage kicked in she developed breasts and widening of the hips. Her parents immediately took action and took her to a doctor to get a “special vitamin” to stop all the feminine actions of her body. The relationship with her parents was bad since the beginning specially after she identified more feminine and her parents would not approve. At the age of seventeen she left her house. Years later and after trying to have a better communication with her parents, she asks her mother with a sense of embarrassment about a scar she has on her private area. Finally, 40 years later her mother tells her the truth. Can you imagine all the mixed emotions?! Forty years without knowing the truth and finally understanding all those feelings as a young individual, must have been tough on her.  This story is so amazing because after finding out the truth she could not hate her parents but only feel a little upset about her parents lying to her and deciding for her without giving her an option.
 * Judy/Max another story worth reading. This story talks about the struggles about determining to behave as a female or a male, not to mention his own curiosity and his parents confusion. Imagine a life trying to find out who you really are and visiting the doctor constantly to find the answers. Clearly, this story has a happy ending with the person finding his true self from within.

Unable to Feel Pain...

I can never forget the first time I flat ironed my hair. I was around 12 years old, and I saw my sister flat iron her hair every day. How can I forget my first experience with the iron if I burned my ear?! I felt a sting at the top of my ear therefore making my arm respond in pulling away the iron from my ear. It is stingy at first, and it started to sting even more until it suddenly began to itch, after a while the pain started to fade away. Then comes the scab which is also a little itchy. Anyways, so pain huh?  Let me discuss CIPA. What does CIPA mean? First of all, it stands for: Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis. Basically what this means is that a person is unable to feel pain, temperature, and decreased or absent sweating. The person can feel touch but the brain doesn’t receive signals of experiencing pain. Now, we ALL need pain to survive in this world. With an inability to feel pain, we are not able to avoid dangers and life-threatening situations.
Gabby is around 10 years old now, and since she was a baby her parents could tell she was different. At a very young stage in her life she started chewing her fingers, biting through the skin and almost reaching her bone, if it hadn’t been thanks to her mother’s intervention. By age 2 she had to have her teeth removed since it was a danger to her tongue and body. Another incidence was when she scratched her cornea. The doctor could only recommend gel eye at the time. Eventually, Gabby scratched her eyes so badly, one of them had to be replaced with a non-functional prosthesis, and was given safety goggles to protect her and the poor sight from her other eye. At the same time, she constantly would burn the inside of her mouth since she couldn’t feel the hotness of the food she would eat.  Not only did she not feel pain, but she also suffered from anhidrosis which means that she cannot sweat therefore making it extremely difficult for her to maintain her body temperature stable. The link shows a video about Gabby and her rare disorder. Gabby will struggle with this disorder all her life; even though she has learned to be a little more careful, she still is innocent and numb when it comes to painful stimuli.
With this said, even though most of us don’t enjoy feeling pain, it is necessary for survival. Many of us probably feel like it is better to not feel pain at all not only physically but emotionally too, but the truth is we need to experience pain.

Memories and Alzheimer's Disease

It’s weird and magnificent at the same time how the brain works and how it lets us form long term memories while at times we only form short term memories. It was my seventh birthday party and all my family was in my house celebrating. Then someone really special to me comes up to me sort of repeating some things and then looking kind of confused and at the same time with that very loving stare. Later I would find out as I grew older and was able to understand the concept of life better, that [she] was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. From there on, she would repeat her sentences more and would sometimes forget what she was saying. My family told me, ‘one day she will even forget how to eat’. I was still not sure what that meant, and I always thought well how can someone forget how to eat?! Then, how will they live? When I was little I would hear my family say that she would get really sentimental and cry for no apparent reason. Clearly she was experiencing a change in her mood. It’s been 14 years since those memories and even though I do not remember the place where I was exactly and word by word of what happened, I can still remember the big picture and the most important aspect of those days. I am so thankful that today she is still here. She does not talk, does not move, she’s in a bed all day in the same position sort of sleeping all day, she is thin and every time thinner, but she has all the love in the world from all of us and constant care from the person that loves her most: her husband.  Her sons and daughters as well as nurses constantly go to check up on her and see how she’s doing. For others it is hard to see her in that condition, therefore deciding to stay away to avoid the pain.

From being able to say complete sentences to just blurting out words and letting us complete her sentences to getting after her husband so we could laugh as she used to do it when we were little, are all memories I can certainly not forget.  Alzheimer’s made her forget us, her memories, and her ability to do daily things, but what is most important is that she is here today. I know that for some people Alzheimer’s can complicate their health issues therefore making it harder to get to stage 7 of Alzheimer’s disease. In the future, I really have hope in someone finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.

This video shows step by step how the brain is damaged by Alzheimer's and how plaques and tangles play a significant role in his disease. It also explains how the disease progresses until a last stage. Very informative and easy to understand.

Visual Connections

 

Have you ever tried closing one eye at a time? Like, first you close your right eye with your left eye open and sort of move your mouth towards the direction of the eye you are closing. Then you try it on the other eye, you close your left eye with your right eye open. Every person that I have met is able to do this. Weird because for some reason: I CAN'T!! Since I was a little girl my sister and brother would tease me because I couldn't close my right eye while having my left eye open. I close both of them! It is so strange because my siblings would tell me to practice, practice and more practice until I was able to do it. Strangely enough until this day I still can't close my left eye. So this leads me to think about left and right hemisphere and their visual connections. I am right handed so I would think that I would be able to close my right eye with no difficulty but the only eye I can close is my left eye. Any explanations? I've always wondered if it might have something to do with the left hemisphere controlling my right side, while my right hemisphere controls my left side. Why can others do it and not me?

I now know that yes my left hemisphere controls my right side, and vice versa. When it comes to my vision, I came to realize that the visual information from each of the optic nerves, gets processed by both hemispheres, but the process of visual input comes from the opposite half of the visual field! What is that? Well, the visual field is the physical environment that can be perceived by a stable eye. Basically, as I've heard before: The left hemisphere sees the right side of the world and the right hemisphere sees the left side of the world. It appears to me as if the visual connection to the hemispheres in the brain tends to be a little more complicated than other parts of the body.

In this picture we can see how the information is processed through both hemispheres, while...

This picture shows what I mean when I talk about the visual field  (this link gives an short description about visual field testing) being processed by the opposite left visual cortex and the right visual cortex.