When The Brain is Offline

Brain is the most vital organ which governs all aspects of life. One of the brain important function is the cognitive. Brain structures which regulate these functions are the limbic and cortex system. These two structures regulate emotion, behavior, motivation, memory, and spiritual.

Through this cognitive function, the brain is changing the outside object sensation into perception, perception into intention, and intention into action.

In the cognitive function, the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), which is in front of the brain into a kind Boss, or performing the highest brain function. The PFC represents sane brain functions, among them are:

1. To guide of intelligent thingking.
2. To determine of the actions and emotions.
3. To inhibit thoughts, actions, behaviors, and feelings which are not appropriate.
4. To create a focused purpose.
5. To create oriented actions and inhibit irrelevant actions.
6. To control various levels of processing, including planning, taking decision, assessing, selecting, maintaining, and updating activity.
7. To regulate emotional stability.
8. Other important functions.

Many studies have shown that PFC noble nature was found in the newborn's brain. In other words, God had conferred the noble brain since the beginning of the infancy.

The universal human potential tends towards the goodness and truth. The further development depends on the environment. Ironically, this kind of environment in which will change human mindsets and behaviors of becoming to smear with sins.

The advance study in brain imaging has the possibility to see the brain change which is associated with abnormal behavior.

According to various studies, someone experiences are very significant in changing the brain's thought patterns and behaviors. In young children who watch too many violence videos, the PFC activity is greatly decreased.

Many social studies have found that these children were having aggressive behavior, brutal, having no merci to their friends and environment.

By the decline of PFC activity, means that the PFC functions which lead to goodness and truth, have undergone offline (stopped). Then, the PFC is no longer controlling the aggressive behaviors.

The reduction activity of PFC is also found on the stress imaging, such as anxiety, and depression. The limbic system also showed an abnormal activity, primitive response called fight or flight (to fight or to run away). These primitive responses include basic humans instinct, just like animals.

Without PFC controls, people will behave abnormal. High stress with the continuation can cause the brain regions, which involved in memories and emotions, such as hippocampus, amygdala, and PFC undergo structural remodeling (structural changes) to become worse. Resulting in memory impairment, increased anxiety, aggression, and abnormal behavior.

Contrary to another interesting study, in people who were praying, the track which connected the limbic system with PFC becomes active. At the same time, the path which connects the limbic system with parietal cortex becomes offline (inactive).

At the moment, all attentions are directed only to God, with no interruption from the surrounding environment. Parietal cortex function is to receive all outside sensations (the environment).

The Studies on people behavior who lived in monastery, did not prove that having strong faith and fervent worship was very useful for life. It was causing people to live longer, avoiding a stroke, or heart disease, have a good immune system, low blood pressure.

The conditions can also improve mental health, emotional, avoid psychological stress, divorce, suicide, and other abnormal behaviors.

Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting

A 20-year-old, Adam Peter Lanza who fatally shot 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the Sandy Hook village of Newtown, Connecticut, was one of the case where a brain is offline.

Adam's brain PFC was offline from the moment he shot his own mother. His brain PFC was replaced by the limbic system response, which savage in nature.

While his brain PFC remained offline, his savage response was having an excessive stimulation. It triggered Adam to conduct the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Shortly after the massacre, Adam's brain PFC was online, and he realized that he had made a fatal mistake. And then, there was the so-called self punishment, a suicide. Adam Lanza shot himself in the head as the police arrived. Suicide is a phenomenon which often obtained in patients with severe depression.

My excessive condolences for all the victims, especially for all the innocent children. Heaven had been waiting for all of them. Amen..

Reference:

Jawa Pos, Opini, December 19, 2012
Bahaya ketika Otak Depan Off-Line by Moh. Hasan Machfoed, Chairman of the Central Board of Indonesian Neuroscience Specialists Physician Association

When Motion Creates Emotion

Primary emotions painting by Christina Boyt

Do you often feel bore? Was your daily activity boring you?

I felt the same way if you say yes for all questions above. And I guess everybody do have at least one boring day in their lifes.

So, how did you manage those boring days?

I assume you will start to make a new activity, or at least, you make your body moves, whether stand up or take a walk. You just make a motion to react with your boring activity.

Now, try this! Go outside! Stand up and look up to the sky! Give your best smile, a wide smile up to the sky! Then, imagine the greatest misery or sorrow you've ever had! Can you do it? Can you managed to bring back that bad memory? Why you cannot do it?

It all because our body did not support to creates that kind of emotion.

So, what is emotion?

I have already described this on my previous post. In Latin, emotion originally meant an inner turbulence, as in a storm cloud, which discharged its forces outward.

Can we control our emotion?

Since we are mentally healthy, we should manage to control our emotion. A simple change of our body's movement, a motion, believe or not, is managed to create another emotion. It depends on what kind of emotion do we exactly want.

An actor was one of best example, about person who managed to control emotion. But, I am not an actor.

Who said that everyone cannot be an actor?

Have you ever been felt angry, happy, or sad? If you have not been felt any of those emotions, you cannot be an actor. Because, even for a crazy person, is also having those kinds of emotions, in which can change every seconds.

Another example that I had described in my previous post titled, Frustrated Inc., it was you the one that makes yourself felt bore, or having any kind of emotions. So, you must not blame on anyone, or anything about the conditions you are having.

The way to forget about the conditions (emotions) you are having, is by starting new activities (motions). Some would call this as breaking the pattern, to make a new one.

Have you ever watched TV shows such as, Candid Camera, Just for Laugh, or any TV programs which intended to make a fool on someone caught on tape?

For example, a man who was being fooled, would be very angry at the moment, but when he was being told that he was on Candid Camera, he suddenly laugh.

How could that be happened?

At a moment the man felt very angry, but when he saw a camera, he suddenly laughed because he knew he was on a famous TV show.

Can you notice the motion that changes the man emotion?

It is when the man was pointed his eyes to the camera, after listening what the TV crew had said to him. A very simple motion that creates emotion.

What is Emotion?

Have you been felt so.. so.. angry? I guess everybody does, but was it the right angry? Being the right angry is to be angry in the right time, right place, with the right person, using the right speech and keeping your voice tone. So that the person you are angry with, will not hate you, or even get mad. If you are a Boss, and your employee has done a mistake that gets you so angry, then you should be angry with his work, and not personally angry with him.

It's best for us to learn to control our anger! Feels angry and moody is controlled by our emotion. We should manage to control our emotional first. If not, stress will block our way to be angry, the right angry. That makes you get emotionally angry. So, What is emotion is all about?

Emotion, mental states, or processes accompanied by marked bodily reactions, which occur to anticipate, or to realize the satisfaction, or frustration of needs. In Latin, emotion originally meant an inner turbulence, as in a storm cloud, which discharged its forces outward.

The earliest writings about these feelings of pleasantness, or unpleasantness, probably are in the Sanskrit literature. The Vedas (3000-1500 BC) and the Upanishads (800-500 BC) contain descriptions of pleasure, pain and sexual enjoyment. Emotions were called passions by early Greek writers, such as Aristotle. Mentalistic philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries were considered emotions to be mental experiences, and later became thing of the mind.

Theories of Emotion

Theory I:
Emotion is an indivisible mind-body reaction. Many authors disagree with the 1st theory.

Theory II:
Emotion is a mental event which depends upon other bodily events. Walter B. Cannon concluded that emotion resulted from the brain structures (the diencephalon, which includes the thalamus and hypothalamus). While for William James, emotion was a mental event dependant upon physiological event.

Theory III:
Emotion is a bodily event which may produce mental events. Carl G. Lange, a Danish physiologist, considered emotion was a bodily event which might, or might not produce mental events. But Knight Dunlap, US psychologist, claimed emotion as the dynamic background of all behavior

Behavior Patterns in Children

John B. Watson believed there were 3 primary emotions which are fear (elicited by loud noise or loss of support), anger (elicited by interference with activity), and lust/love (elicited by mild tactual stimulation of erogenous zones). He believed that all emotional life developed from these 3 behavior patterns.

Watson also describes 8 behavior patterns in infants that may be regarded as distinct emotional changes:

1. Startle (fear), to sudden intense stimulation.
2. Struggle (anger), to interference with movement.
3. Muscular arrest-tumescence (sexual excitement), to sustained gentle stimulation of the skin.
4. Exaggrerated withdrawal (pain), to sudden pain-producing stimuli.
5. General activity (excitement), to susutained unpleasant internal sensations.
6. Quiescence (pleasure of relief), to relief from unpleasant stimulation.
7. Spitting-mouth aversion (disgust or revulsion), to unpleasant tastes.
8. Exhaustion-whimpering (disappointment or grief), to persisting and unrelieved unpleasant stimulation.

If those above patterns of behavior are discrete in human infants, they would be relatively discrete in adults. Nina Bull has demonstrated differences in muscular attitude among some of these commonly accepted emotions, and many experimenters are attempting to determine precise differences in autonomic, and endocrine responses to stressful situations.

Sources:

• John B. Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919).
• Carl G. Lange, and William James, The Emotions (1922).
• Walter B. Cannon, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (1929).
• H. M. Gardiner, and others, Feeling and Emotions: A History of Theories (1937).
• Nina Bull, The Attitude Theory of Emotion (1951).
• H. F. Dunbar, Emotions and Bodily Changes (1954).
• M. A. Wenger, and others, Physiological Psychology (1956).
• M. B. Arnold, Emotion and Personality, Vol. I (1960).
• P. T. Young, Motivation and Emotion (1961).
• Encyclopedia International by M. A. Wenger, University of California.