Mental Abilities: Genius, Savant and Autism. :)

1. Explain in detail what "savant syndrome" means.
    When a person who is autistic or is a mental handicap has a great ability or is brilliant in one area but has a difficulty doing any other everyday tasks.

2. What does genius mean?  Explain the difference between genius and savant.
 Genious is a person that has incredible intellectual abilitiy. The difference between a genius and a savant is that savants are only amazing in one area while geniuses are amazing at everything.

3. What is a stroke and how could it affect your mental functioning?
    a stroke is a sudden death of many cells in an area of the brain caused by bad blood flow. It could hurt a part of the brain that controls speach and you may not be able to speak again, it all depends on the area of the brain where the stroke happens but it would make a part of your brain stop functioning.
4. What is a functional MRI and how does it help us understand brain activity?
    Magnetic Resonance Imaging, it is a kind of xray that allows us to see the soft tissues inside of the body.  With the MRI machine we can see the brain working and see what parts of the brain works when we do certain activities.

5. What is the corpus callosum and what role does it play in your brain's activity?
 It is a bunch of nerves in the middle of the brain that connect the left half with the right half, it controls the communication between the two.

6. What is epilepsy and how might it affect your brain's abilities?
Epilepsy is a disease in which a person has seizures that begin in the brain. In some cases of epilepsy the corpus callosum could be affected, if this were to happen the left and right parts of the brain could not work together.
7. What is autism?
Autism is a disease in which a person is socially awkward, has unusual mental abilities, and has odd speech patterns. Autistic people see the world in a different way than non-autistic people do.

8. What is Asperger's Syndrome?
disorder that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.

Homosexuality: Nature vs. Nurture

Whether homosexuality depends on nature or nurture is one of the most controversial topics in the world. The people who take the nature side believe that a person who is homosexual is born this way that they are genetically homosexual. People who take the nurture side believe that a person becomes attracted to the opposite sex depending on the environment that they grow in. In reality people have not discovered any scientific reason for why a person becomes gay or lesbian; it all depends on a person's opinion.

There are many factors that support both nature and nurture. A theory that supports nature is that when a woman is pregnant with a boy the body sees the boy as an invader and creates antibodies against the excess testosterone levels. After having more than one boy, the antibodies get stronger and more effective. The less testosterone a boy has the less manly they are, this can cause someone to become gay. A theory that supports nurture is that maybe a person can be abused of by the person of the opposite sex when young and therefore is scared for life, becoming scared of having a close relationship with a person of the opposite sex causing him or her to be homosexual. There are many theories that support both nature and nurture, but there is no way to know for sure what the actual reason for homosexuality is.

Mind of a Criminal.

Criminals are not born, they are created. A person can become a criminal for many reasons. The first reason is that the part of the brain that controls drives can be damaged. When this happens people may not be able to control their anger or their stress and this can cause people to be violent and unreasonable. Something else that could create a murderer is abuse in home. If a person is abused of they would grow up learning this and end up treating their families the same way they were treated when they were small. Also, when children are hit in the head it could cause brain damage.
An example of a murderer that we saw in the video was one that had become this way because he was sick. He was borderline retarded, had a bipolar disorder, and had suffered from brain damage. Although it didn’t affect his everyday life, one day he had an attack of violence and killed his wife and kids for no reason.

Even though there are scientific reasons for why a criminal becomes the way he is it doesnt mean that the person should be forgiven. What they did was still a crime, and they should be punished for their actions. If they find that a person was sick, they might intern him into a mental hospital but it doesn’t mean that the person should be free just because they have an excuse for what they did. everyone should take blame for their actions.

Traumatic Brain Injury.

Brain damage is caused when someone suffers a strong hit in the head, this causes the brain to move inside of the skull, when the hit is strong enough the brain gets injured with the walls of the skull.There are three kinds of brain damage, moderate, mild, and severe brain damage. Moderate brain damage is the one that is less harmful, it causes little damage and it takes only a few months to recover from it. Then we have mild brain damage, this causes more damage in the brain that moderate brain damage therefore it takes longer to recover from it. Last we have severe brain damage, this causes very grave damge to the brain and it is most probable that you will never recover from severe brain damage. People who suffer of brain injuries have a very difficult life, if their injury causes unrecoverable damage to the brain people could have the hardest time performing simple tasks such as walking, speaking or eating, basically they could end up behaving and acting like a newborn baby would. These people would usually have to live in a hospital or with the care of their family, their lives would be very difficult.

Mind Reading :)

When we think of mind reading we think that it is something that can only be done in Twilight books or in the Heroes series, but scientists today have created advanced technology that helps us make mind reading possible. Scientists created a machine called an MRI machine, this machine has allowed us to see how the brain works and in a way, it can read our minds. When a person gets inside an MRI, it shows them images, math problems, words, etc. and the machine lets us see what part of the brain activates, what part of the brain we use when were thinking of a specific thing. Also, it may show us an image of a room and the machine can tell you if the person watching the image has been there before or not. This is something very useful especially in court, many people have been put to jail because the evidence leads to them but they claim to be innocent. The MRI can help us tell is the person is actually guilty or innocent; this way innocent people would not be punished for a crime that they did not commit. MRI´s are a great advancement in technology and they have made what we use to see as fiction into reality.