Consciousness

Consciousness

The conscious mind is the part of your mind you are aware of. The part of your mind that YOU control and can make your own thoughts, actions and the things we do with absolute full intention, while the unconscious mind is the part of your mind that do things automatically without you thinking about it or controlling it, like breathing heart breath and sometimes anticipation. What actually can happen is that these two “minds” can “overlap” and actions and thoughts become automatic and just happens all by itself, it’s like you’re not present, your thoughts just goes wandering off without you. With this in your thoughts you can ask yourselves “Do we actually do anything fully conscious?”

                I think that we actually do things fully conscious and aware of it. If you think about one action you would like to perform like “Pick up that object”. And you perform that task. But not every single task is done fully consciously. Because according to many studies previous experiences can affect the choices your unconscious mind makes. If you have done something many many times, it becomes a almost automatic thought or action. For example if you are a football goalkeeper and you are used to catch footballs, this can turn into an almost automatic action, for example if a ball is flying towards you it can take milliseconds before you even realize that a ball is flying towards you, but before you even think about blocking the ball your unconscious mind has already started the movement to bring your hands up and block the ball. So I think that to a certain degree your conscious actions and thoughts are controlled and chosen by your conscious mind. Not always but sometimes on a rare occasion it happens.

                Another thing I think happens “by itself” to a certain degree without your conscious mind influencing is who you are and what makes you, you, like; your personality, the choices you make behavior and thoughts. I think that who you really are can’t be influenced by your conscious mind, you can pretend and occur as another person in front of others, but I don’t think you can change your personality, it’s like it’s always there but you are not aware of it, it’s in your unconscious mind all the time. But one thing I think you actually can decide yourselves is the choices you make. Some choices are harder than others to make, because of your personality. But it’s still possible to make the choice with your “conscious mind” the part of your mind that you are currently in control of, and I think you are directly in control of. What I think is that your behavior is something that is a part of both your conscious and unconscious mind, it’s like a crossover between these two. You don’t always think about how you are behaving, your unconscious mind does it for you, but sometimes when you need to you can control it yourselves. The thoughts in your head is something I think also must be a crossover, for example; you get the first impression of a new person you just met automatic from your unconscious mind and you can also think about specific things that you would like to think about.

So some thoughts and actions are made by your unconscious mind, and some are made consciously. And some things can be “done” with your unconscious mind purely trough earlier experiences, and some are a crossover of both the conscious mind and the unconscious.  

Brain scanning Technology

How does the brain work? The brain controls your body by sending out signals through the nerve-system. It controls a lot of things at the same time like; body temperature, blood pressure and heart rate. The brain collect, process and stores information about what is going around you, it collects the info through seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting. The brain handless physical movement such as walking, talking and standing. It also allows you to think, dream and express emotions. If you get Alzheimer’s disease all of these tasks that the brain does on a daily basis get’s hard for the brain to conduct. The Alzheimer’s disease makes it harder for the brain to access memories and perform tasks. The disease does not have a cure, and we do not know what the cause of Alzheimer’s is but it is possible to spot the disease through brain imaging technology.

fMRI

The fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) takes advantage of the fact that when neurons are active more blood is sent to that area. The fMRI can detect metabolic changes which indicate brain activity. The fMRI computer creates images, which are put together to a video. The strengths of fMRI is that it can create a map of the brain that shows brain activity in real time, it’s easy to use and that is why it’s often used to detect symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. The weakness with fMRI is that the machine is very expensive to buy and operate, and for the fMRI to work properly the subject must lie completely still. The fMRI can be used to detect symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease before the patient suffers from severe memory loss and problems performing tasks. Therefore fMRI can contribute to detect Alzheimer’s so the disease can be slowed down as soon as possible. The fMRI is used to localize brain activity and functions of the brain by comparing damage on the brain and what cognitive functions are malfunctioning.

The fMRI is not only used as a tool to spot and detect Alzheimer’s, in the case study of “The effects of meditation on the brain” where people with different skill level in meditation tried to concentrate while being interrupted, showed us that the fMRI is a excellent tool to see what part of the brain does what in real time. In the case study we learned that the experienced test subjects had less brain activity while concentrating.

PET

PET scan

The PET scan (Positron Emission Tomography scan), works by injecting a radioactive substance into the patient brain. The brain metabolize the substance at different rates whether the different parts of the brain is active. The gamma rays that are produced is detected and turned into an image. PET scans are good for showing a dynamic image. PET scans can be used to spot Alzheimer’s disease, and that means that it also can contribute to locate Alzheimer’s disease so the patients can get medicines to slow it down. The weakness with PET scans is that it is not as precise as fMRI, and the fact that you actually injected radioactive substance into the patient. PET scans can also evaluate cancer and blood flow.

As the fMRI the PET scan can be used too many different tasks, it was used during a study called “PET evaluation of bilingual language compensation following early childhood brain damage” where the brain of a kid that was raised by deaf parents and had a brain damage was studied. With the help of the PET scan, scientists were able to compare the boy’s brain to healthy average kids. The scan revealed the areas of the brain that were undeveloped and where the brain damage were located, and the area that was underdeveloped was the area of the brain where language is “stored”.