--Original published at KatieMillerPSY105

For this week’s first impression post I chose to watch the “Exploring the Mind of a Serial Killer” TED talk. I chose this video because it addresses the question I had when I first came into this course. I wanted to know why some people are serial killers.

In this video, Jim Fallon discussed how people became killers. To find this information, he looked at about 70 different brain scans of people. He did not know which brain he was looking at the time, either a serial killer’s or a regular person’s. He found that how you end up a psychopath or killer depends on the precise timing of when the brain was damaged. He also found a pattern that every killer he looked at had damage in their orbital cortex. There was a pattern in all of them, but the damage was a little different. This depended on the MAO-A gene. He went on to say that it is a sex-linked chromosome located on the X chromosome which is how it is passed from mother to son. Fallon had then found some of these genes in his family pool, so he looked at everyone’s brain in his family. Luckily, the gene has not shown up yet, but he jokes that somewhere down the line there will be some bad news.

I thought it was most interesting to hear that there is a pattern in all the serial killers’ brains. Also, I thought it was interesting that the gene is a sex-linked X chromosome and as Fallon says, that is probably why we see more male killers than female killers. Another thing that was fascinating was that it has to do with too much serotonin in the brain which is weird because serotonin is supposed to make you feel calmer. If your brain is bathed in it, it causes your brain to become insensitive to the serotonin meaning it will not work later in your life.

In addition to the gene abnormality, most psychopathic killers also were involved in a significant traumatic event during childhood. This event occurs before puberty and has a dire impact on the child’s development. As Fallon states, there are several factors (genetics, brain damage and environment) which contribute to a person becoming psychopathic.

I would believe that Jim Fallon is a trustworthy source because he is a neuroscientist and has been studying behavior for 35 years. He is a professor at the University of California as well. In his research, Fallon studied 70 different brains to base his conclusions to the audience. Through his test subjects were known killers, Fallon was able to study the brain structure of his family members to determine if the latent psychopathic gene or brain damage was present. Given his background and years of study, I believe that Jim Fallon is a trustworthy source.

While Fallon’s research studies the anomalies of a psychopath’s brain, I would be interested to investigate whether the traits mentioned in his study can be a predictor of future violent behavior. Since one of the common factors in Fallon’s conclusion is genetic, research participants could be divided into groups based on the MAO-A gene. These groups would be a control environment. Since Fallon’s conclusion is based on the timing of the damage to the brain, the participants can be monitored during childhood through puberty to identify any potential significant traumatic events (such as exposure to violence, physical altercations or abuse). With a detailed study, a correlation may more fully develop between heredity and environment. If a strong correlation is found, would this allow societies to screen children and isolate those that are more prone to violent and psychopathic behaviors?

--Original published at CatherinesCollegeBlog

I chose the TED talk “How we read each other’s minds” for this first impression post. I was drawn to the title of this video because I have always been curious of what others think, whether it’s what they think of me or what they think of other events and people in the world. The ability to read minds has been my go-to superpower to choose since I can remember.

Throughout the years, philosophy has wrestled with the problem of other minds: whether other people have minds and why it is hard to know or change what other people think. Rebecca Saxe, the speaker for this TED talk, introduces a new problem with other minds. She asks how is it so easy to know other minds, like when we are shown a picture of a mother holding her newborn and can instantly see thoughts of love. Saxe identifies the region of the brain responsible for thinking of other people’s thoughts, known as the right temporoparietal  junction or the RTPJ. Saxe then suggests, could differences in how adults think about other people’s thoughts be explained by differences in the RTPJ that controls this? To find out, she performed a research study where a hypothetical “Grace” and her friend stop for coffee. The friend asks Grace to put sugar in her coffee for her, and when Grace goes to do so, she notices the white powder that looks like sugar is labeled “deadly poison.” Grace still decides to put the white powder in, which ends up having no effect on her friend after she consumes the coffee. People were asked about the blame they felt Grace should receive, and Saxe tracked their RTPJ activity as these people made their decisions. When there was little brain activity observed in the RTPJ region, people paid little attention to Grace’s belief that the sugar was really sugar and they said she deserved a lot of blame for any accident that could have resulted. When there was a lot of brain activity in that region, people paid more attention to her innocent belief and said she deserved less blame for an accident that could have occurred. The research participants were then exposed to a magnetic pulse that when sent to the RTPJ region would disable the person’s control of this area and create involuntary reactions. The magnetic pulse reversed people’s decisions about the amount of blame they thought Grace should receive, which suggests that it is possible to change people’s moral judgements.

What I found most interesting was the impact of the magnetic pulse on the research results. It is a bit alarming the control certain technologies, tools, and tests, like the magnetic pulse, can have over our behaviors and thoughts. It also makes me wonder the true significance of morality and just decisions when something seemingly unbreakable (depending on the person) can be so easily manipulated.

Rebecca Saxe seems like a relatively trustworthy speaker, as she is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT. She also used a correlation graph to illustrate the relationship between RTPJ activity and the decision for the amount of blame to be given. She performed research not only for the study regarding sugar, but also with young children and their ability to recognize hypothetical thought processes of toys. Her studies cover a relatively wide age range which is also good.

My research idea would question whether the magnetic pulse can control our moral decisions, instead of just disabling them to cause the involuntary reactive decision. This would enable researchers to create desirable outcomes for their research participants involved in the study. Essentially, instead of the magnetic pulse simply changing our original moral decisions, it would control which decision we make. I would send different variations of the pulse to the RTPJ to test which pulse creates which reaction and perform the study with multiple people to ensure the replication of whatever reaction it creates.

--Original published at Tiffany'sCollegeBlog

For my chapter 2 first impression, I chose to watch the Ted Talk called “Toward a New Understanding of Mental Illness.” I chose to watch this because now a days in the media everyone is talking about mental illnesses and how it can affect people in many different ways. I think that it’s a good topic to bring up so that people are aware of what can happen to people who have mental illnesses. 

In the talk, Thomas Insel talks about how doctors have been able to decrease the amount of people who have Leukemia, Heart Disease, AIDS, and Strokes through medication and getting the people who is experiencing that problem to the hospital quickly. Early detection and early intervention will help people not be disabled after coming out of the hospital. He wants to see if it’s a possibility to lessen it with depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia to see if it lowers the amount of suicides a year. 

The most interesting thing I found out about was that there are 38,000 suicides a year, 1 about every 15 minutes and it’s mostly people between the ages of 15-25. I also found it interesting how there are less car accident deaths and less homocides than suicide deaths. I think that mental illnesses and suicides sometimes aren’t see as important as they really are. 

I think that Thomas Insel was very trustworthy. He stated that he even worked for the government and that “you all” meaning the audience, pays him to do the work that he does. His actual job title is the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health. His job is to make sure that we are moving in the right direction for lessening the amount of mental disorders and how we can treat them. I also think that his research that he did was very professional and he had graphs and brain scans to show the difference between the way someone looks with depression versus someone that has schizophrenia. Having that background and research to help support what he was saying was helpful.

A research study that we could conduct could include looking at brain scans of people who have mental illnesses and people who don’t have mental illnesses. My research question would be: Does someone with anxiety have similar brain scans to someone who has depression? For doctors to see symptoms early and start fixing the problem before anything serious happens, you can take a brain scan of multiple ages, especially the 15-25 age range where most suicide happens. The study of course would have to be longitudinal and be over a long period of time as you want to see if the people are improving or not. 

--Original published at Kealey's PSY105 Blog

For this week’s post, I chose to watch Thomas Insel’s TED Talk titled “Toward a new understanding of mental illness”. I was intrigued by this video because I have always had an interest in trying to understand the causes, effects, characteristics, and treatments of mental illnesses, especially because they are so prevalent. Insel began his talk by demonstrating the large decreases in deaths caused by physical diseases like stroke, cancer, and heart disease. Disturbingly, a statistic that has remained unchanged is suicide rates. The difference in success between physical diseases and suicide is early detection. Cases of heart disease or cancer that are detected early decreased patients’ chances of death. If we treated brain diseases as we treat physical diseases, Insel argued, it would produce less morbidity and mortality in mental illness cases. This is a different perception of mental illness than we have had in the past. Usually, diagnoses are delayed until behavioral symptoms are present. However, new technology has allowed us to detect abnormalities in the brain years before altered behavior patterns manifest.

What I found most interesting about the talk was also the most obvious. We do not diagnose mental illnesses until indicative behavior is present. This poses the question: Why are we not taking more measures to detect brain disorders early in life? Insel explains that although there is prevalent evidence to support his claims, the technology for studying such occurrences is still very new and not yet suitable for mass testing. I find Insel trustworthy and logical in his claims. It makes sense that he has access to this kind of accurate information because he works for the government. His anecdotes and statistics are notable, yet believable. I would be interested in what progress he and his department has made in treating mental illness in the future.

 My research question for the effects of detecting early brain disorders would be: Does detection of bipolar disorder before behavioral symptoms result in a better quality of life? To conduct this study, I would compare longitudinal case studies of patients who were diagnosed after behavioral signs and patients that were diagnosed before behavioral signs, based on brain scans. I would look for trends in manner and life quality of the patients from a behavioral point of view and an introspective point of view.

--Original published at Jenna'sPSY105blog

I chose to do this week’s First Impression post on the TED Talk, “Toward a New Understanding of Mental Illness” by Thomas Insel.

What Drew You to Choose the Talk You Did?

I chose this TED talk because I have a fascination with mental illness and I love to learn about them. And I think that the more we can understand the diseases of the mind, the more people can learn to cope with it better.

Summary

Thomas Insel speaks about the increasing amount of suicides in the U.S. He wonders, since doctors have been able to decrease the number of deaths by heart disease, stroke, and leukemia through early detection and medication, if we are able to also do that with schizophrenia and depression, and in turn lowering the suicide rate.

What Did You Find Most Interesting About the Talk?

It was crazy to me that there are 38,000 suicides in the U.S. every year, about one every 15 minutes. Thomas stated that that is double the rate of homicides, and more than the number of fatalities from car crashes. Also, 30% of people with disabilities are due to having neuropsychiatric disorders. I guess I just never really realized just how prominent mental disorders and suicide really are.

How Trustworthy Do You Find the Presenter and the Information He or She Presented?

I think that Insel is a very trustworthy source for information. He is the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health. His job is to ensure that we are moving in the right direction with mental disorders and treating them. He has definitely been a part of many research studies and been exposed to a vast amount of people struggling with all kinds of different mental disorders.

Come up with a research idea of your own based on the information presented in the talk and briefly outline how you would conduct it.

In order to do research on this subject and how to detect mental disorders early and medicate them early, we have to know what we look for. This experiment would have to be done over a long period of time. You would have to track the progression of people who are medicated later in life and how their mental disorder effects their brain over time, and then you would also have to medicate a child with signs of the disorder and track their symptoms of the disorder to see if there are any differences or benefits of early intervention. You could test multiple ages of people showing symptoms for the certain disorder, maybe a young child, a teenager, an adult, and an elderly person and retrieve brain scans of them every so often over a certain period of time. This experiment would be very hard because no one brain is like another, people show symptoms in different ways, and the brain scans could look different. So it would be important for the researcher to collect a lot of data based on the similarities and differences in brain scans.

--Original published at Kirsten's Kreations

For this first impression, I chose “Exploring the mind of a Serial Killer”. This stuck out to me the most because I have been interested in criminal shows and have taken a couple of forensic courses in the past year.
Jim Fallon uses this Ted Talk to tell the audience about a research study he was part of. The research study looked at the brains of serial killers. They had given Fallon brains to study without telling him who they were from and then he would look at the different parts to come up with his conclusion. In the ted talk he gave the audience a look at slides of some of the results he had. A couple of these slides showed the common links between serial killers included, damage to the brain, MAO-A gene, and violence in childhood.

The most intersting part was to see how his research ended up affecting his own life. While telling his mother about some of his research she told him about his ancestors that were serial killer. Based on his research and family tree he was influenced to start studying his own children, nieces, and nephews to see how they would turn out.

Jim Fallon and his evidence ia trust worthy because he is a professor at the University of California. He also studied behavior through genes and neurotransmitters for 35 years. Fallon was also able to use his own family tree as evidence to support his theory.

If violence is a trigger of serial killers, does violence in videogames also influence the young minds of future serial killers?

I would do scans on boys of the same age. I would run the same tests Fallon did on boys who have a lot of interactions with violent video games and those who don’t at age 10. From there was can see how videogames trigger the brain. If the reaction is simmilar to those who are serial killers or not.