Post #4

"At any given moment, the brain has 14 billion neurons firing at a speed of 450 miles per hour. We don’t have control over most of them. When we get a chill... goose bumps. When we get excited... adrenaline. The body naturally follows it’s impulses, which I think is part of what makes it so hard for us to control ours. Of course, sometimes we have impulses we would rather not control, that we later wish we had." -Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) on Grey's Anatomy


An example was given in the section about firing neurons, comparing the action to the firing of a gun in the sense of it being 'all or nothing.' This example continued to stick with me, primarily because I can relate. Deer opener is coming up in a little more than a month and I of course can think of nothing else. Because in the same way, the example is true. Last year I was posted up on the side of a field, and two white tails came streaming across me from a snowmobile trail which was below me. I locked on and shot, but i had forgotten to take off my safety and so nothing happened. yes, it most definitely was embarrassing, but it was an all or nothing situation just ass the book had said. One thing, however, the textbook does not mention is what is something to stop the firing of the neurons. 

Finding out about what stops neurons, was next for me and so I googled it (of course) and the first thing to come up was drugs. Imagine that. The type of drug, the website appsychology.com is actually referring to, are antagonists drugs which bind onto receptor sites on a neuron and keep it from firing. This wasn't much help either, and so I found an example of an antagonist drug, which was propranolol. Propranolol acts as a beta blocker and is used to treat tremors, high blood pressure, angina, and other heart conditions. 

Aside from that, according to Dartmouth college drugs again are used to stop seizures. Seizures are a result of rapidly firing neurons, and with certain drugs they are able to stop and prevent the retrigger. There are risks however, to using drugs to stop seizures because a person may not respond to the drug quickly enough, more severe damage may be done, or neurons deep in the hippocampus may continue to fire. 

The idea of seizures is so prevalent in my own life as it is in just about everyone's. A neighbor of mine has a dog, who takes seizure medicine. And one day she had tried to explain to me what it does in terms of preventing future seizures but I became utterly confused. Just by reading the one section within the book of how the neurons are always firing, as a gun would, gives me much more knowledge into understanding more of the human brain and its uncontrollable impulses.