Books & Brains

This post is a connection to Chapter Three: Brains, Bodies, and Behavior.

   While reading through the portion of my Introducing Psychology textbook pertaining to brain function this year, I was strongly reminded of one of my favorite authors, Lisa Genova. As a former neuroscientist, several of Genova's novels feature main characters suffering from neurological diseases that impair their brain function, such as Still Alice, Genova's New York Times bestselling novel (and eventual hit movie) focused on a woman suffering from early-onset dementia. My favorite book of Genova's, however, is Inside the O'Briens. Though it may be a bit of a tear-jerker, Inside the O'Briens is riddled with heaps of information on what is referred to as the "cruelest disease known to mankind," Huntington's disease, which is the illness that the O'Briens find themselves suffering from. Huntington's is passed down genetically through family members, and is the result of excessive CAG trinucleotide repeats within the HD gene (above the normal maximum amount of 36). Huntington's disease primarily affects the brain's basal ganglia, which then inadvertently impairs other areas of the brain, and causes cognitive, muscular, behavioral, mood, and psychological issues. For example, Joe O'Brien is seen suffering from unexplained involuntary muscle movements prior to his diagnosis, and later remembers his mother suffering from depression and cholera (from Huntington's) when he was a child.

   Something else that came to mind while reading about brain function was my cousin who was recently diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). After experiencing temporary blindness and muscular issues, she visited a doctor who revealed her disease. MS is an autoimmune disease where the nervous system attacks the myelin sheath of nerves in the brain and causes numerous symptoms, such as anxiety, vision loss, involuntary movements, slurred speech, and more. There are also different types of MS, and while some patients worsen steadily over time, others experience bouts of symptoms during relapses and remissions. Although a decent amount of information regarding MS is known, a lot has yet to be discovered, like a definite cause for the illness. Diseases like MS show how much information has yet to be discovered about the brain and its impairments.

   Lastly, this week I began reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, which brought me back to thinking about all of the parts of the brain I learned about. In his intriguing collection of case studies, Sacks details several strange neurological impairments and diseases experienced by various patients he encountered over the years. In the first chapter, Sacks recounts the story of a puzzling patient, Dr. P, who exhibited an array of strange behaviors when he visited Sack's office for a diagnosis. For instance, before leaving Sacks' office, Dr. P grabbed his wife's head and tried to pick it up because he mistook her for his hat -- hence the name of the book. Eventually, Dr. P's condition was dubbed "face blindness," and is a result of complications with the right fusiform gyrus, which is part of the temporal and occipital lobes of the brain and -- although scientists haven't fully identified its function, they know it has something to do with recognition pathways. Diseases and impairments like the ones written about by Genova and Sacks and the one exhibited by my cousin truly demonstrate the complexity of the human brain, and remind me of how many different functions in our bodies it controls.