The Psych Student

Zombie girl image source from io9. I'll give anyone who can name the movie it's from a Skinner Box food pellet as a reward.

The blog io9 has a a funny/facsinating post on  the explanation of zombie (the film variety as opposed to the voodoo folktale sort) brain functions as offered by Dr. Steven C. Schlozman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a lecturer at the Harvard School of Education.

“Absent a properly functioning frontal lobe, a zombie is driven entirely by base emotions – such as rage – that are housed in the primitive parts of our brain, notably the amygdala. There’s precedence for this in nature. A crocodile brain, for instance, is mostly driven by the amygdala. Researchers have confirmed this by introducing lesions into the amygdala of animal specimens: the result is a drop in the attack and retreat response that correlates significantly with the amount of damage that’s done to that region of the brain. A crocodile without an amygdala isn’t really a crocodile. As such, Schlozman argues, ‘you can’t really be mad at zombies, because that’s like being mad at a crocodile,” adding that it’s the delicate balance between frontal lobe and amygdala ‘that makes us human.’ ” - Schlozman

Schlozman’d explanation is laid out in a phony medical journal article in which he identifies the disorder seen in films such as Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later as “Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome.”

One question in the article that remains unsolved, but is seemingly somewhere outside of brain function is “If zombies are constantly eating, then how come they never poop?”

Read: A Harvard Psychiatrist Explains Zombie Neurobiology

Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology, neurological sciences, neurosurgery and biological sciences, was selected to talk by the Stanford University graduating class.  His speech was a great way at showing how optimistic an outlook it is to embrace the fact that we’ve got very little not in common with most other animals, particularly our closest ape cousins, and how once we figure that out our specific niche we paradoxically face the challenge of pushing beyond it, which is the thing that makes us different.

A couple of weeks ago, in order to spur action on this blog some and sort of get myself in the right head space for heading back to class I signed this blog up at Research Blogging. A more interesting blog aggragation community I have not come across. Specific enough to be reliable, varied enough to be endlessly fascinating. And the citation tool is proving to be entirely functional for academic purposes as well as for the site’s aggragation needs.

In celebration of getting my act together and putting all my course registration materials in the post on time yesterday, I offer here five links from Research Blogging’s Pychology section that I found most compelling:

1. Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder: The Newest Mental Illness? I became interested in trauma through ITTP which deals with torture and war survivors. But is there a new thing now hitting The West? And does it show how possibly mentally vulnerable we are that a stock market blip can actually cause so much mental discord?
2. Developmental “foreign accent syndrome” – cases documented for the first time Can an operation turn a Yorky kid posh?
3. Real gods are stranger than fiction – for adults at least Unless, of course, you’re talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
4. Is there a rape switch (Possibly one of the most heated comment-section debates going on, which reveals almost more about people’s perceptions, particularly men, on the subject than the study itself.
5. How we learn to judge the size of faraway objects This one was very interesting with regards to developmental and cognitive psych, but also brought the following clip to mind: