--Original published at Site Title

Out of the given TED video options, I chose to watch Jim Fallon’s “Exploring the Mind of A Killer”. The reason I chose to watch this video was because of the intriguing title. I have been a huge fan of TV shows such as Criminal Minds and CSI for many years, and I have always been curious as to what it is that makes killers think they way that they do.

In the video, Fallon explained that he found that the serial killers he examined all had similar brain damage which contributed to their homicidal thought processes. Not only did they have brain damage, but they also carried the sex liked gene MAOA. The fact that the gene is sex linked is why serial killers are most often male. Fallon’s research has also shown that when a child has experienced a traumatic event, they are more inclined to think like a killer, or to be a killer. When you have someone who has the MAOA  gene and has also experienced trauma at a young age, the outcome typically is not good. While I found all of this new information to be interesting, I found it the most interesting that Fallon himself has a family history or several murderers.

I do believe that Fallon and the information he presented was trustworthy. Not only has he studied neuroscience for 35 years, but he is also a professor at the University of California which leads me to believe that he is a credible guy who presents credible information.

Based on the information I have learned, I would conduct an experiment to determine why the MAOA gene effects some people, but not others. Fallon mentioned that many normal, non-homicidal people carry the MAOA gene, and I am curious as to why it effects some people in such a severe way. In order to do this, I would compare the lives and family histories of ten normal people with the MAOA gene, and then do the same thing with ten homicidal people with the MAOA gene.

--Original published at Collin's Blog

I chose to view the TED talk “The Real Reason for Brains” looking to learn some insight to the brain’s function and reason for each of those functions. Daniel Wolpert gives his theory of the brain’s primary function being movement. Every sensory that is controlled by our brain such as vision and touch are thought to be supporting factors of our body’s overall movement. Also, emotional feelings such as love, anger, and passion are all motives by our brain to drive movement to reproduce which is the lifelong goal of most organisms on the planet.

What I found most interesting about the talk was his theory on how our brains judge anticipated movement. His formula for anticipated movement was the movement command given by our brain(which would be our prior knowledge and memory) subtracted by our sensory input( such as pain, sense of touch, and feelings). This would equal to be our anticipated movement or anticipated force. An example that Wolpert used would be hitting a tennis ball. As your brain processes the movement and velocity of the ball coming towards you as well as muscle memory from previous knowledge, it sends a movement command to the muscles to begin swinging your arm (this would be the movement command portion of the formula). Next, when you make your swing the original force from the movement command is interrupted or in some cases increased by sensation from internal feelings of intensity, control of your arms follow-through, and also the initial impact of the ball to your racket. This would be the sensory input portion of the formula which decreases the force of the movement command in order to control the return of the tennis ball across the court.

I found that Daniel Wolpert was very reliable and trustworthy with his information. He used simple examples to support his evidence and supplied supporting evidence from his own conducted experiments.

To conduct an experiment to support this I would observe the difference between a baseball player hitting a baseball in an attempt to hit the ball as far as possible and then the same player attempting to hit the ball to land in a specific location far under his maximum range of hitting distance. The experiment would have to be repeated by at least ten other players in order to gain a sufficient sample size. The player going for distance would have a much greater force exerted by his muscle movement in order to hit the ball showing that there is no sensation that will restrict his movement command force. In the player aiming for accuracy, his force exerted by his movement would be much less due to his follow-through sensation and movement control taking away from the initial movement command. The force exertion could be measured by distance traveled by the ball or if given the opportunity to use real life laboratory equipment, sensory detectors could be placed on the player to directly measure the force of his swing.

--Original published at Melissa's Blog

I chose to watch Thomas Insel’s TED talk “Toward a new understanding of mental illness.” I was drawn to this talk because mental illness is prevalent in my family and I am always eager to learn more about it. Insel’s TED talk emphasized that the mortality rates of common diseases/illnesses, such as leukemia, heart disease, AIDS, and stroke, are starting to decline. However, suicide rates from mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, PTSD, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, ADHD, OCD, and borderline personality, have remained just as high since the peak in 1965-1995. The death rates from the other illnesses are decreasing because of early detection and intervention. Mental illnesses are not noticed early because people often assume they are behavioral disorders. Insel stresses that metal illnesses are not behavioral disorders, but brain disorders. To have a decline in suicide rates, brain disorders need to be detected and treated early like other illnesses.

To me, the most interesting aspect of this TED talk was the statistics about brain disorders. They are extremely common; 1 in 5 people are diagnosed with a type of brain disorder. They are disabling; 1 in 20 people with brain disorders become disabled. Lastly, they have an early onset; 50% of people show signs of a brain disorder by age 14 and 75% by age 24.

The presenter, Thomas Insel, was credible because it is his job is to make sure there is progress in treating brain disorders and decreasing suicide rates. Even though minimal progress has been made, he has been researching and investigating. Although Insel cares about this topic, he has not found a solution to the problem. He stresses the importance of early detection and early intervention, yet he does not tell us how to achieve this. He is unsure of what tools will be used to detect brain disorders and does not know what to look for before the abnormal behaviors are apparent. He does reassure the audience/viewer by telling us this is a step in the right direction.

I think brain disorders could be recognized earlier by monitoring children who have abnormal behaviors. Although this method is still behavior-based, it could prevent the brain disorder from progressing into a disability. Another option would be for people to get brain scans if mental illness is common in their family, or if they show unusual behaviors at an early age. However, this method would be very expensive.

--Original published at Manda's College Blog

What drew you to choose the talk you did?

I personally find it fascinating to learn more about killers and their mind set as well as their history.

Briefly summarize the talk.

The neuroscientist, Jim Fallon was explaining the differences of the brain in a psychopath/murder compared to someone who isn’t and took notice that nearly all the psychopaths brains had damaged orbital cortex which is above their eyes. He briefly explained that one becomes a “certain” type of psychopath depending on when the traumatic event happens which he claims is very significant. He mentioned that most of us have violence genes and he explains because the male is created by only x chromosomes they are more likely to become psychopaths lacking the Y chromosome.

What did you find most interesting about the talk?

I found that the comparisons of the serial killers brains at various ages had almost the same kind of brain damage; and I wonder why the orbital cortex is where the significant damage is. I also found it shocking that on his fathers side he’s related to some significantly known killers generations ago.

How trustworthy did you find the presenter and the information she or he presented? Explain why. (Note: you must go beyond talking about the reputation of TED talks in general)

I felt that Jim did a very good job in the beginning, showing actual brain scans and using his position as a neuroscience to back these claims. I wish he would have been more detailed about his relation to actual serial killers and give us reasoning why he and his relatives that he scanned didn’t inherit those genes. When he discussed children that are living with violence on a daily basis I felt was almost out of topic; he didn’t show any stats or brain scans if those children are even serial killers or even psychopaths. He expressed that you become a psychopath due to significant trauma(s); but one can argue that there are many people out there who aren’t psychopaths and have dealt with trauma.

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.

I would do a elongated study on children (male and female) who have experienced trauma and follow them to adulthood. Brain scans would be required every year to watch any brain changes or even damages. Fallon claims that males tend to be the ones that become serial killer/psychopaths the most, so I’d also like to pay attention to the females to see if this common claim is true.

--Original published at JanellesCollegeBlog

For this first impression post, I chose to watch the Ted Talk video titled, “Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s mind.” I was drawn to this video because of the title. I was really curious about the brain’s ability to read other people, and what they are thinking or what emotions they are feeling. I thought it would be interesting to see if there was a way to manipulate how others feel and act.

In this talk, the speaker presented about a specific brain region that allows us to read each other. This brain region is called the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ). In adults, this region is specialized while in children, it has to develop slowly. I thought this was particularly interesting because we learned about children being egocentric, and this helps provide an in depth explanation about why this happens. The development of this brain region occurs between the ages of 3 and 8. The speaker then continues to talk about the causal role that this brain structure has in individuals. She explains that the differences between people, and their ability to think about others is caused by differences between this part of the brain. Some people use the RTPJ more than others to think about other people and their thoughts. Finally, the speaker continues to talk about manipulating this part of the brain with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to influence the moral judgement of individuals. TMS technology sends a small magnetic beam into the brain and when targeted to a specific area can change the effect of this area and the behavior of the person. She provides examples of research that she’s done with TMS and the RTPJ. She found that she can change the moral judgement of people by putting the magnetic beam on the RTPJ.

In this talk, I found the videos showing the children and their development and maturation of the RTPJ the most interesting. It was eye-opening to see the reasoning behind children’s responses to a pretend situation and how they develop as they get older and as we know, the RTPJ matures and specializes. By looking at children of different ages, you can clearly see how the RTPJ develops.

The presenter was trustworthy because she mentions that she is a teacher and a cognitive neuroscience scientist. I also think that she is trustworthy because she included videos of her actual studies in the presentation. This provides validity to her results because you can see her first hand experience and how she got to her conclusions of the experiments. The only place where I questioned her trustworthiness was when she mentioned that the average “typical adult mind” that was studied was actually only from MIT graduates. This would not be a representative sample of the human population, so I was skeptical of the conclusions that she was drawing to humans.

A research question that I would be interested in studying would be if you can change the way individuals perceive other people’s emotions by using TMS on the RTPJ. To conduct this study, I would have the participants look at pictures of the faces on people showing an emotion. I would have them state the emotion that they saw in the face of the person, and then I would admit a magnetic pulse of TMS to the RTPJ to see if the responses change based on the magnetic beam. It would be interesting to see if you could manipulate how the participants viewed other people and their emotions by manipulating a specific part of their brain. I would only conduct this study on adults who have a fully developed RTPJ in order to make the results more reliable and trustworthy as to not bring in the variables of underdeveloped RTPJs.

--Original published at Sidney's college blogs

I chose the TED talks video of Jim Fallon: Exploring the mind of a killer. Why someone would have a desire to kill another human being, or multiple, has always blown my mind. This explains my addiction to binge watching the tv show Criminal Minds. It has always fascinated me, so it caught my attention to write this post on it. This video talked about the make-up of the brain and the differences that a psychopathic killer has within the brain. He found damage within the orbital cortex of psychopathic brains. The timing of damage within the brain has a lot to do with the outcome of a psychopath. The genetic make-up of the brain also influences the result of a murderer. Jim Fallon talked about the gene MAOA, which is on the X chromosome. It makes too much serotonin during development, so it is no longer able to be affected by serotonin later in life. The serotonin allows a normal person to calm down, but killers can’t because their brains are too used to the serotonin to be able to respond to it. It explains why most killers are men. Another aspect that leads to a killer is a traumatic event. The combination of all of these causes a psychopathic killer. I believe that the study is true and accurate due to the fact that he described the way he examined the brains. He did a blind study, so he didn’t know if the brain he was studying was a psychopathic killer, or if the brain was just a normal human’s. This assured him to examine each brain fully and equally. The thing that surprised me the most about the talk was to learn that the damage done to their brains actually influences the result of a killer. I thought it was more of the genetic make-up of their brains rather than damage to them. It was definitely interesting to learn about.

An idea I would like to research is traumatic events and how they impact the brain. Traumatic events have a way of messing with your entire life, so I would like to see of what severity it starts to impact your thoughts, your actions, and your mental state. Jim Fallon explained that a traumatic event induces this within killers. It would be interesting to see at what severity things start happening to the brain. It would be a very unethical experiment to do, so a natural observation would have to be done with those who have been through a traumatic experience or are experiencing them still. Surveys could also be filled out by the participants. The survey would consist of questions on what their outlook on things and how they feel internally. The actions that they do may align with or disagree with the way they say they think and feel. The altering of their thinking will show what type of traumatic event can cause what within the brain.