Heart Really Breaks

Did you ever had the  feeling of “Heart broke” ? When someone you care or love is hurt or dies in front of you ..Its like your  heart actually jumps, stomach churns, eyes pop out ..its a very sick feeling of helplessness.

This feeling of helplessness causes diastolic flaccidity – a drastic reduction in blood pressure – It explains the physical heartache of grief, loss or betrayal. In addition, it reduces circulation and causes cardiac irregularity or palpitations, with frightening symptoms such as faintness and tingling in the face and extremities.Thus explaining the symptoms of Heart Break !!!

Depression

After reading   Science Times today about Douglas Prasher,a scientist who might well have won the Nobel Prize but  today earns less than ten dollars an hour driving a shuttle bus for a Toyota dealership in Huntsville, Alabama   I feel depression will not  interferes with productivity to the detriment of the sufferer, the nation, and humankind.

This month, Roger Tsien, of UC San Diego, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University, and Osamu Shimomura, of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on a fluorescent jellyfish protein that can be used to tag cell constituents. Their discoveries were based on Prasher’s.He isolated the relevant gene — and gave the information away freely. He understood how the protein it elaborates could be used as a tracer molecule. And he began to elaborate the gene and protein structures. Generously, Chalfie has said, “They could’ve easily given the prize to Douglas and the other two and left me out.” Another colleague is has called Prasher’s current situation a “staggering waste of talent.”

But for various reasons – none of the press sources is very clear – Prasher was sidetracked, first into other scientific work and then out of research altogether. The one consistent part of the story is a reference to recurrent depression. Of course, this vague information does not constitute a diagnosis. We don’t know what Prasher suffers. But “depression” is the shorthand for the condition, and it will do — because this is what depression does. It causes job interruptions and then underemployment. In time, a young genius has exhausted his life savings and is driving a courtesy bus.

Disowning Body Parts

Hide your right hand under a cloth and stick the rubber hand where your right hand should be. Now have someone stroke your right hand and the fake hand at the same time. Before you know it, you’ll begin to “feel” sensation in the rubber hand. Your body begins to disown your real right hand .This is called rubber-hand Illusion
Brain scans reveal that the premotor cortex, the part of the brain that integrates vision and touch, helps the body adopt the rubber hand, but no one had looked at what was going on with the hidden, real hand.

Lorimer Moseley, a neuroscientist who studies pain at Oxford University in the U.K., and colleagues repeated the rubber-hand experiment with 11 participants , but they added a twist: They took the temperature of the hidden hand. During the 7-minute illusion, the researchers found that the average temperature of the hidden hand dropped 0.27°C ; the temperature of other body parts, including the person’s other real hand, remained the same.

The researchers also tried stroking the rubber hand and the experimental hand asynchronously, a trick that diminishes the illusion. In this case, the hidden hand cooled down but slightly less than when the hands were stroked at the same time. The more strongly volunteers rated the vividness of the illusion, the colder their hidden hands became, the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team also tested whether the hidden hand became less sensitive. The researchers touched volunteers’ index fingers on both real hands in extremely rapid succession and then asked them to guess which one was touched first. Participants tended to ignore information from the hidden hand, often guessing that both fingers had been touched at the same time when really the hidden hand had been tapped first. Overall, the findings suggest that the body begins to forget–or even disown–an appendage once a convincing substitute is present, the authors say.