top of page

07.16.2018: One Chapter of Nonfiction

Today's soundtrack is Passenger: The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

This evening, I'm reading the first chapter of Anne Rooney's The 15-Minute Psychologist, "What Can We Learn From a Brain?"

Because psychology analyzes the activities of the brain, psychologists have always tried to find the best ways of "monitoring our thought processes" (p. 17). Early scientists started by looking at the brains of cadavers. They ascribed functions to different parts of the brain depending on behavioural changes exhibited by those who had suffered traumas in various parts of the brain. The independence of the two hemispheres of the brain was proven by cutting through the corpus callosum, the nerves that connect the two hemispheres.

There are now several ways that scientists "can monitor or examine brain structure and activity" (p. 23):

CT scans are X-rays that show a 3d picture of the brain; an EEG shows "the electrical impulses produced by brain activity" (p. 23), a PET scan shows where the brain is directing oxygen and glucose; an MRI uses "radio waves [and] a powerful magnetic field to [...] produce detailed anatomical images of the brain" (p. 25); and an MEG tracks "magnetic signals produced by neural activity" (p. 25).

By using the above methods to compare groups in studies, scientists have found that it is possible to build up neural pathways through practice, that psychopaths have "similar brain abnormalities" (p. 26), and that the left side of the brain is used for language processing.

The placebo effect is what we see when people get better from an illness when they are only being given sugar pills if they believe they are being given a potent medication. The nocebo effect is the opposite: people sometimes feel side effects of a medication they have been told they are taking, even if they are only taking sugar pills.


bottom of page