Genie the feral child

In 1970 the police found a thirteen year old girl locked in a dark and almost empty room in a house where she lived with her parent and an older brother. The room consisted of one crib where she slept and a potty chair which she was tied to most of the time. The girl is recognized by the name Genie to the public to keep her identity more private. Both parents were accused for child abuse but her dad committed suicide the day before going to court. Even though Genie was thirteen, she was the size of a six year old kid when she was found. She was malnourished and since she had not been able to move around her body was extremely weak and she could not walk properly. Also her father would beat her if she tried to speak or made any noise so she had learned to stay quiet. This meant that Genie was unable to speak and communicate. She was one of the mot extreme cases of child abuse which made her very interesting to psychologist and linguists. Researchers thought this was such a great opportunity that they set up a team of psychologists, linguistics, and teachers that would partially study Genie and partially help her recover. There had been a theory that children are only able to learn language during a specific period of time and when that time has passed it is too late. Genie would have passed this phase already so depending on if she could learn language or not she would either support the idea or maybe even prove it wrong. At the beginning Genie made great progress and she started to learn words and expand her vocabulary. It looked very promising and everybody thought that the theory would get proven wrong when Genie started to use words to describe emotions and events from the past. But then the progress stopped and she didn't move forwards anymore. She knew lots of words but she was unable to make any sentences and she could not understand grammar. There was a similar case in France during the 1800's when a twelve year old boy just came out of the forest one day. He was very hairy, ate things humans would not normally eat, he moved more like an animal than like a human and he had scars all over his body. All of this showed that he had been living in the woods for most of his life. His teacher failed in civilizing the boy, who they called Victor, and he was not able to learn language either. He only learned a bunch of words, just like Genie. Both these cases supports the theory that there is a deadline for learning language, even though you can learn how to produce words later. Another big question that the scientists had was that they wanted to know if Genie was retarded from birth or if the only cause for her slowed brain development was the extreme abuse and mistreatment. They did sleep studies (eeg) on her and the results were abnormal but they couldn't draw any conclusions from it.
 

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is an anxiety disorder thought to be caused by exposure to a traumatic event. People with PTSD can be victims from sexual or physical abuse, people that experienced a car accident, or soldiers coming back from the military. What happens with these people is that they relive a terrifying moment over and over again. The strong memory can be brought back by small things like seeing something that reminds them of the event and all of a suddenly they feel all the emotions they felt at the occasion of the actual event. Symptoms of PTSD often includes thing like flashbacks, hyper-arousal, nightmares and isolation. Victims of abuse might choose to be more is isolation because they are scared of the outside world and they think that what happened to them once will happen again, and that it is unenviable. These people as well as veterans have another strong reason for not wanting to interact with people; they feel like nobody can relate to what they've been through. They feel like people sometimes make fun of them for being so "dramatic" and that it can feel pointless to be around people who do not understand what it feels like have seen death. Some also have trouble getting close to people again because they are scared that they are going to lose them and they want to avoid that kind of pain again. Many of the soldiers coming back form war also have survivors guilt. They start questioning why they survived and not their friends and they often don't feel like they deserve to live. It is not considered manly to ask for help so to deal with all their problems when they come back many of the soldiers turn to alcohol and drugs, and many of them want to go back to the military where they feel like they fit in and everybody knows what they are going through but this only makes the problems bigger. Prolonged exposure therapy is when you make the patient remember what happened and describe it detail. This is done repeatedly so that the person won't associate the memory with as strong feelings as time passes. Another method for recovery is cognitive processing therapy. This is when the patient is taught to separate the event that happened to them from normal life and realize that what they've been through isn't normal.
   

Alzheimer's and brain-imaging

Alzheimer's was first described by a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist named Alois Alzheimer in 1906. The disease is the most common form of dementia and it is 100% fatal meaning that nobody survives it. In 2006 there were about 26.6 million people worldwide with Alzheimer's and in 2050, 1 in 85 will be expected to have it which would mean that about 100 million people would have it.  Alzheimer's slowly kills the brain and the first and most affected area is the hippocampus. The first sign of the disease is memory loss but since Alzheimer's is a disease that comes with age, people think that the forgetfulness is because of the aging so they feel no reason to be worried. It's not until the person starts forgetting major things that the family or friends are alarmed and feel that something is wrong. Another early sign of Alzheimer's is that the person starts repeating questions or telling the same stories over and over again, even during the same day. If the disease is discovered early enough the patient can be given medicines. These medicines do not cure the person but they can slow down the process of the killing of brain cells. During the middle stage the memory loss keeps getting worse and the patient start forgetting personal history and they also forget who their family and friends are. This can be very hard for the loved ones to witness since they can no longer have the same relationship as they once had with the person. They also easily forget what they were doing or where they were going and they can easily get lost in familiar settings. The patients sometimes get lost in their own yard or they go out to get the mail, but forget what they were doing and don't remember how to get back inside. At this stage personalities might change as well and the sweetest person might become aggressive and grumpy. At the third stage of Alzheimer's the patients can rarely speak and they can no longer take care of themselves. Basic functions shut down one by one and they start loosing abilities like swallowing for example. These patients need around the clock supervision but they will all eventually die, it is just a matter of time. Since Alzheimer's is such a big health issue there are many people studying how Alzheimer's effects the brain with the hopes of getting a better understanding of what happens and most importantly, finding a cure for the disease or find a way to stop it from happening. So far they have not succeeded with either of the two last ones but they did make some helpful findings. Magnetic Resonance Imaging, (MRI) is one of the most common ways to study the brain. MRI's can be used to scan your whole body and by using an MRI you can get very clear images of what the structure of the brain looks like. This means that you can identify if anything seems abnormal in the structure or if the brain is shrinking for example. They also show how the blood flows and can therefore be used to detect any problems with circulation and they are completely safe to use. But there are some weaknesses with MRI's. To start with are they very expansive which means that not everybody can afford it. Another thing is that you have to lie completely still while the machine is scanning your brain, and a scan can take anything from 10 min up to 2 hours. Also a weakness is that they can't say anything about the cause or effects of anything they find so you can't draw any real conclusion, only assumptions. Another method used when studying the brain is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). MRI's and fMRI's work in very similar ways but the main difference is that an fMRI's show brain activity in all parts of the brain and not just images. But you can't establish cause and effect relationships here either. Another limitation for both MRI's and fMRI's is that it can not be performed in a natural environment. The machines used are huge and they can't be moved. What this means that all the testing is done in labs and never in real life situations.