Asleep, Hibernation, Coma, or Vegetative State?

As I was shutting down my laptop a few minutes ago I noticed that Bill Gates asked me if I wanted it to shut down, hibernate, or go to sleep. My first thought was, "I clicked on 'turn off computer', what do you THINK I want it to do?" My second thought was, "What is the difference between hibernating and sleeping?"

My friends with the Colorado cabin that my family uses at Christmas think there is a difference, at least with bears. One night last December my grandkids decided to go outside into the woods, with snow up to their knees, to play "Flashlight Tag." I couldn't think of a reason for them not to, except that sitting inside in front of a warm fire seemed smarter to me, but I texted the cabin owner and asked him what he thought. He texted back, "Since it is winter, the bears are hibernating, so it should be okay." (They have a bear problem during the summer. One tore off the door and broke into their shed, hauled out the freezer, forced it open and ate the entire contents last summer!)

The question about the difference between sleeping and hibernating made me remember an article I read a few weeks ago about the debate on whether or not people in a vegetative state can communicate. Some researchers have recently claimed they can. When you ask some people in a vegetative state to visualize a face and then ask them to visualize a house, different areas of their brain fire, as shown by a fMRI. This, they say is an indication that "someone is in there and trying to communicate." Other neuroscientists have argued that cognition is not communication.

Here was the question I had as I was reading the article, "What is the difference between a coma and a vegetative state?"

Merck.com says: "A coma is unresponsiveness from which the patient cannot be aroused... The vegetative state is a chronic condition that preserves the ability to maintain [Blood Pressure], respiration, and cardiac function, but not cognitive function... The patient has no awareness of self and interacts with the environment only via reflexes."

The authors of the original article I was reading said that the easiest way to determine the difference was that people in a coma have their eyes closed, while people in a vegetative state have their eyes open.

Now that I have kept my computer on so that I could post this blog, I am going to tell it to "turn off" because I feel an afternoon "sleep" coming on. I will not be hibernating, in a coma, or in a vegetative state, so please be quiet when you walk past my big green LazyBoy.

My Wife Was Cold Blooded

My wife had surgery this week in an attempt to restore the hearing in one of her ears. She now has a Titanium middle-ear bone in it and we think the surgery was successful. We will know for sure in a week or so when they remove the packing on both sides of the eardrum and her ear rebounds from the trauma done to it by surgery.

A serendipity of the experience was something I learned from the anesthesiologist that I can bring back to my general psychology classes when we talk about the brain.

Before the surgery he asked her if she had ever had any complications from anesthesia. She said no, but that she usually is really cold and can't stop the shivers for a while. He said that was common and the name for it was - here's your word for the day - poikilothermia. It literally means "cold blooded."

In fact, the good doctor told her that poikilothermia causes one to temporarily become like a snake, unable to warm her body with her blood (cold blooded).

Anesthesia, which forces deep sleep upon a person, works on the midbrain, the part of the brain responsible for lower-cognitive functions - those functions that take some cognitive ability but that you don't want to actually have to think about - like walking and sleeping. I now know that it is also responsible for regulating body warmth.

I'm kind of glad my wife doesn't read my blog. If I want her to know that I called her "cold blooded," I will be the one to tell her, not you!

I Can't Remember if I Have Photographic Memory Or Not

This is so intuitive that I am embarrassed I never thought of it myself.

Does Guinness World Records holder, Akira Haraguchi, who recited from memory the first 83,431 decimal places of pi, have a photographic memory? Do the winners of the annual US Memory Championship have photographic memories?

Alan Searlemann, a St. Lawrence University psychology professor, says no: "According to mounting evidence, it's impossible to recall images with near perfect accuracy... If [their memories] were truly 'photographic' in nature, you wouldn't expect any errors at all."

Here it is in a nutshell: if someone truly had a photographic memory, their recall would be perfect. It never is. It would be like you looking at a photograph and someone asking you to tell them what is in the photo while you are looking at it. You could do it perfectly.

Also exposing the myth of photographic memories: "People with Herculean memories tend to be adept at one specific task... a person who memorizes cards may be inept at recognizing faces."

POP QUIZ: How many decimal places of pi did Akira Haraguchi recite from memory?

If you had to look back to see, you don't have a photographic memory.

You Will Find This Mesmerizing

Franz Mesmer was a German physician born in 1734.

He developed a theory he called "animal magnetism," in which human health is affected by the gravitational pull of various planets. He also believed that people could manipulate their health through the use of magnets to counteract the planetational pull.

He knew nothing about psychosomatic illness - physical illness that has a psychological source - and achieved enough success using magnets to become famous for his cures with them. This became know as "Mesmerizing" someone.

Enough scientists doubted his claims that eventually scientific research was done that showed the same results without the magnets. Do everything Mesmer was doing, but without the magnets.

POP QUIZ: What were the results?
ANSWER: The same as with the magnets.

It turns out that it wasn't the magnets that were producing the cures, it was the suggestions that Mesmer made while using the magnets.

The power of suggestion.

Today we call it hypnotizing someone, rather than Mesmerizing them.