Author Archives: stella

The man whose brain has been penetrated by iron bar

We all know that brain is one of the most important human organs. Now imagine someone whose brain has been penetrated by a 1.1 m long iron bar weighting 6 kg …OUCH!! That sounds horrible!

This unfortunate man is named Phineas Gage. Gage used to be a normal railroad worker, but one day at work in 1848 he made a mistake with his explosives which shot an iron bar towards his head. The iron bar entered  his left cheek and pierced through his brain and exited through his skull. With an injury this gruesome and severe you probably think that there is no way he’d survive. That was what people around him thought too: they prepared a coffin for Gage. But amazingly, he survived this terrible accident. In fact, most of his intellectual functions were quite normal because most of his brain was actually undamaged. The primary site of injury was his prefrontal cortex, which resulted in drastic personality change in Gage.

Phineas Gage skull via Wikipedia Commons from uploader Roy Baty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prefrontal cortex is in the anterior part of the brain. Different parts of the brain have different functions and this particular portion of the brain is important for planning, attention, and behaving appropriately in society. Because of damage to the prefrontal cortex, Gage changed to a different person. Before the injury Gage was hardworking, responsible, and popular among his co-workers.  After the injury, however, he was stubborn, impatient, violent, and non-compliant. He lacked self-control and even molested children!Because of his obnoxious personality after the injury, people felt he was “no longer Gage”

Here is a video account of Gage’s story:

from youtube user Jpick311

Gage’s story is a great tragedy but it provided strong evidence that prefrontal cortex of the brain is involved in personality and contributed a lot to brain research.

-Stella Meng

Let’s Facebook!

Have you blamed Facebook for distracting you from studying for an exam? When exam time comes many students prefer to study in the library hoping to focus better, but most of them actually end up on Facebook! As “harmful” as Facebook use may seem to young people, the psychology researcher Janelle Wohltmann shows that Facebook may have social and cognitive benefits to elderly people!

Facebook as weapon of mass distraction via Flickr creative commons

Wohltmann’s study involved three groups of 14 participants of age between 68 to 91. The participants have either never used Facebook or used it less than once a month.

(Group 1)

Wohltmann provided training on how to use Facebook to the older adults in the first group. Participants were asked to befriend each other on Facebook and post on the website at least once every day.

(Group 2)

The second group of participants were taught to use Penzu.com, an online diary site. Participants in this group were asked to post at least one entry per day containing no more than five sentences, which are the typical lengths of Facebook posts. However, unlike on Facebook, the diary entries were private and not shared with anyone.

(Group 3)

The third group of participants were told that they were on “waitlist” for Facebook training but the study subjects did not actually complete the training.

Elderly people on Facebook via Flickr creative commons

Prior to the actual experiment, the participants completed questionnaires and tests to measure their level of social connectivity and cognitive ability. At the end of the study, participants completed the same tests and the performance differences were measured and analyzed.

Study results show that participants in the group who learnt how to use Facebook performed approximately 25% better on the assessments than the other two groups, who did not really show much improvement. Hence Wohltmann concludes from her study that teaching older people to use Facebook could improve their cognitive functions and also make them feel more socially involved. A possible explanation to the cognitive benefit of Facebook is that on Facebook there is always new information coming in so people need to constantly shift their attention and re-focus. 

Although more research is needed to further confirm and expand on the results of Wohltmann’s study, Facebook seems to be a rather promising way to improve old people’s cognitive ability and make them feel more connected!

-Stella Meng

Sci-Fi turned into reality: Transplant organ made from plastic!

A lot of things around us are made of plastic, but did you know that plastic commonly found in soda bottles can be made into a fully functional organ that can be transplanted into patients?

Human organ is one of the most scarce medical resources.  For example, in Canada last year, nearly 5000 Canadians were on waiting list for organ transplant, and about 200 people died while waiting for one. What if YOU needed a transplant organ one day? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to synthesize human organs from scratch? It turns out that stem cell research is the most promising solution to organ shortage.

So what are stem cells? Stem cells are cells that have the ability to self-renew and turn into specialized cells. Examples of stem cells include bone marrow cells and blood cells.

A couple of years ago, a patient named Andemariam Beyene had a tumor in his windpipe and was out of treatment options. His doctor Paolo Macchiarini came up with a radical idea: to build a new windpipe out of plastic and the patient’s own stem cells.

Video about Mr. Beyene’s plastic trachea: 

http://youtu.be/_GyQWAiDu0w

(From youtube user NTDTV)

The tissue engineers first obtained CT scans of the patient’s existing trachea and tailor-made the plastic trachea to ensure it matched precisely.  They then covered the plastic with the patient’s bone marrow stem cells and placed it in a in an incubator.

After two days, the semi-artificial organ was implanted into the patient’s body. The surgery was a success and Mr. Beyene is now breathing normally. In fact, he does not even need to take drugs to prevent organ rejection issues (which are common problems associated with donor organs) because his own cells were used to develop the transplant organ.  

As of today, only simple organs like windpipe have been made from stem cell and transplanted, but the future of stem cell research is promising. It’s possible that in 10 years or so, complex organs built from stem cell will save your life!

-Stella Meng