"SECRET WINDOW"

FROM THE MOVIE "SECRET WINDOW"(2004)...
This movie is about a man named Mort Rainey(Johnny Depp) that moves to a cabin by the lake after discovering that his wife is having an affair. Mort has writer's block. One day a man named John Shooter(John Turturro) came to Mort's door step and accused him of plagiarism of his book "Sowing Season". Shooter gave Mort his book to see. Mort threw the book away but his maid got the book out of the trash and then Mort eventually read it. The book was almost exactly the same as his, "Secret Window". Mort trys to prove that he did not plagiarize anything. Shooter kills Mort's dog and the detective that he hired, along with the witness and left the two men in a car. So, Mort rolls the car off of a cliff since he thought that he would get blamed anyway. Then, Shooter burned Mort's wife's house down. Mort's conscience brings him to realize that Shooter is not real. Shooter is Mort(Dissociative Identity Disorder). Through this, it shows the darker side of Mort, doing things that Mort wouldn't normaly do. He discovers that he has lost his grip on reality resulting in insanity.
His wife comes to check on him and finds the cabin vandilized. "Shooter" was curved into the wood and wrote on everything. She believed that his change in personality was due to drinking alcohol. Then she saw that "Shooter" was really meant to be "shoot her". It was written all over the walls. Then Mort reveals himself as Shooter and kills her boyfriend. Then, by reciting Shooter's ending of his story "Sowing Season" he kills his wife.
Mort's writer's block was finally over. Mort sowed a garden in his back yard full of corn. A police officer came out to talk to Mort and told him that he knew what he had done but had no evidence. He said that he would put him in jail when the bodies were found. Mort's remark was, "The ending is the most important part of the story, this one is very good". What Mort did was plant a garden to destroy the evidence.
This was a very good movie. It relates to chapter 14.6 on dissociative identity disorder(multiple personalities). This is what Mort haves in "Secret Window" with the two personalities of Mort and of Shooter.

HOARDING..BURIED ALIVE

FROM TV SHOW..HOARDING BURIED ALIVE(Date: 4/22/10 @7:00 am)..
This show is about two ladies that are hoarders. A 57 year old receptionist, Charlotte Carrithers from Portland Orgeon wants to change her ways of being obsessive-compulsive. She buys things because she thinks that they make her feel good. She feels that she has to buy these things. If she doesn't buy them, she feels a lot of anxiety. After 20 years of hoarding, her 2 bedroom house is piled to the ceiling with clothes, books, and everything that you can imagine. There about 1,000-2,000 books in her house. She says that she feels hopeless and depressed and all of her stuff makes her feel secure.
A personal organizer comes in and helps her get some of her stuff separted. Charlotte decided to let alot of things go. She gave her nearby goodwill store boxes of stuff. Now she has a pathway through her house so that she can walk through and not crawl over a heep of things.
The other lady is a 44 year old woman, Shelley. Her two decades of being a compulsive hoarder is tearing her family apart. Her husband is ready to get a divorce and her kids are being affected by all of the clutter. Her youngest son Mark, stays in his room and doesn't talk very much. She says ever since a tradgic auto accident, she has started to collect things and she feels that she can't get rid of anything. The anxiety is overwhelming. She has sixty bottles of shampoo and hundreds of bars of soap piled everywhere in the house. Behavioral psychologist, Dr. Johan Rosqvist done a experiment on her by taking one of her sparkly pens to see how long it would take her to forget it. You could see the panic in her face, she said that she would never forget it. A personal organizer, Ellen also came to her house to help. Shelley did not get rid of anything but she did organize alot of things and put them downstairs in a basement. Her kids felt alot better and her husband because she cleaned up enough to get their dining room, kitchen, and living room back.
This tv show is very sad and this disorder tears many families apart. This show relates to what we have just studied in psychology about people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder.(chapter 14.4)

The Strange Link Between Herpes and Memory

FROM DISCOVER MAGAZINE(APRIL2007)...The Strange Link Between Herpes and Memory. Herpes Simplex virus type 1 may be linked with Alzheimer's Disease. The connection involes apolipoprotein E(protein that helps to transport cholesterol through the body). There are several apolipoprotein E(apoE) genes including APOE-e4, which is a risk factor for developing Alzheimer's. Also, people found with APOE-e4 gene and herpes simplex DNA in their brains are more likely to be afflicted with Alzheimer's. Neuroscientist Howard Federoff and his colleagues from the University of Rochester School of Medicine created mouse-cell cultures that included either the APOE-e4 gene or others such as APOE-e2 or APOE-e3, then infected the cells with herpes. The virus was more likely to be active in the cells with APOE-e4. "APOE-e4 may control the way the virus decides if it is going to be more or less active", Federoff says. How this may predipose a person to Alzheimer's is still unclear but it may involve a receptor molecule for the herpesvirus in the connections between nerve cells. "The failure of the electrical connections, which would cause cognitive impairment, might be linked in some way with the herpes simplex virus," Federoff says. Federoff includes that he doesn't want people to believe just because they may have the herpesvirus or cold sores, they are going to develop Alzheimer's. The virus show just one possibe factor. There are medications that can prevent reactivation of the virus-and cold sores. If it be necessary to prevent herpes simplex infection in the first place to ward off Alzheimer's, "it could spawn an effort to develop prophylactic vaccines", Federoff adds.
Chapter 6 in the textbook is all about memory. At the end of Chapter 6.11, it talks about Alzheimer's(A form of mental deterioration that occurs in some people as they grow old) and it says that a gene that is involved in cholesterol production is also known as a risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's. This relates to this article in DISCOVER MAGAZINE.

Scientists teach Australian animal to aid in it's own survival

FROM THE GASTON GAZETTE--(April 18,2010) Scientists teach Australian animal to aid in it's own survival... Northern quolls in Australia have been killed by eating large poisonous cane toads. Researchers: Richard Shine, Jonathon Webb, and Stephanie O'Donnell from University of Sydney came up with a theory that they would feed 31 quolls tiny dead cane toads(not enough to kill them, less than a 10th of an oz.) laced with a nausea-inducing chemical to see if their memory of the stomach churning, would make them think again before eating another poisonous cane toad. The researchers then released the 31 "toad-smart"(conditioned) quolls and 31 "toad naive"(unconditoned) quolls into the wild, fitted with radio collars designed to fall off within a month. Results were that the conditioned female quolls survived nearly twice as long as the unconditoned ones. Also, the conditoned male quolls lived five times lolnger than the unconditoned male quolls. This article used Behavioral Modification explained in Chapter 5 of my text book. The quolls avoiding the cane toads is an example of negative reinforcement

The Origin of Schizophrenia

FROM DISCOVER MAGAZINE (2007)..The Origin of Schizophrenia... One day a girl named Elyn Saks was walking home from high school when she realized the houses lining the street was sending her messages, "Look closely," they said. The messages was telling her. "you are special... especially bad." In her first year of Vanderbilt University, she was hospitalized. She feared that her head was going to explode and take along thousands of innocent bystanders with it. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia (a genetically influenced disease that presents itself differently in everyone it attacks). This mental illness appears to have no discernible upside and offers little hope of resolution. A study, headed by neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins University, say that schizophrenia is most likely related to the process of neuron creation. This revealed that a gene linked with schizophrenia, known as disrupted-in-schizophrenia 1 (DISC 1), regulates the migration of new neurons it the adult brain. Researchers used mice in an experiement, they reduced the levels of DISC1 in them during neurogenesis, the unborn neurons sped up and overshot their inteded targets within the hippocampus (area of the brain that holds memory, emotional processing, and social cognition). When the neurons reached their destinations, they formed an unusual number of connections with neighboring cells--a series of events that might raise the abnormal brain functions associated with schizophrenia, according to Hongjun Song. DISC1's apparent involvement in both neurogenesis and schizophrenia could help explain the persistance in this mental illness. It is possible, Song says, that further research will lead to a drug treating schizophrenia by restoring normal neurogenesis. Chapter 14.8 relates to this article on schizophrenia.