Alcohol, Website Usability, Marijuana, and 'The Bourne Identity' - Free Report Example

Week 1

Alcohol's Impact on Synaptic Metabolism

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Synaptic metabolism is the specific chemical composition and metabolic functions that take place at the synapse. Alcohol (chemical name is Ethanol), has a wide range of impacts and especially alterations in synaptic metabolism (Lovinger & Roberto, 2010). Alcohol is known to reduce the activity of synaptic metabolism within a short period; when the brain is exposed to alcohol at an acute rate, it usually inhibits or activates the working of proteins that take part in synaptic metabolism (Lovinger & Roberto, 2010). When exposed to alcohol for an extended time, usually results in the production of contradicting homeostatic impacts on the way these proteins that take part in synaptic metabolism are expressed, and how they function and get localized (Valenzuela, 1997).

Once alcohol exits the alimentary canal, it enters the bloodstream where it finds its way in the brain. The main effect of alcohol on the brain is altering the normal functioning of the neurotransmitters. There are two forms of neurotransmitters, excitatory and inhibitory. Excitatory neurotransmitters excite the electrical systems of the brain while the inhibitory does the opposite. It reduces the brain's electrical excitement. One of the inhibitory neurotransmitters is GABA. In the brain, alcohol does two things consecutively: Alcohol usually raises the GABA neurotransmitter, which in turn leads to impaired movements and slowed speech. Simultaneously, alcohol inhibits the activity of one of the excitatory neurotransmitters called glutamate. This subsequently slows physiological activity. While doing this, alcohol raises the level of dopamine release in the brain. (Dopamine is the brain's rewarding hormone) this usually makes the victim feel pleasure. While the mind is made up of different sections, alcohol usually attacks four main areas: the cerebral cortex, cerebellum, hypothalamus, pituitary glands, and the medulla (Stephanie, 2005).

Week 2

How Websites should be optimized to Allow Better Usability: A Case Study of the Simply Psychology Website

Selective attention is how one’s awareness is directed to a specific stimulus while ignoring other stimuli since they are considered irrelevant with regards to what one’s to focus on. Herein contains information on how the website simplypsychology.org has been arrayed and how it affects selective attention. The paper also includes ways in which the site has enabled better information uptake and ways in which the website can be optimized to allow maximum information uptake (Rizzolatti et al., 1994).

Simply psychology is a website that mainly provides the content to users on different psychological based topics. Therefore, users who visit this website usually are aimed at landing on a page that gives direct navigation to the content. It is also expected that once the website user opens the website, critical information will be the first to be noticed. However, the site has few navigation elements. Unlike the table of content such as the one used in Wikipedia to show the reader what to expect at a glance or enable the reader to scroll immediately to the desired subtopic, the simply psychology does not have these navigation tools in place. Although there are few titles placed at the top of the page, they require one to click on them to get what is contained therein. Yet, sometimes the user wants to peek in and see if there is another exciting topic related to the one that is open already. This contradicts with the human interaction principle of exposure which describes that user is usually aware of different functionalities via meeting them at the interface level (McHale, 2011).

Another distracting element in the simply psychology website is the myriad advertisements that are animated. According to the human-computer interaction principle of focus, human beings tend to be more observant of animated objects than static ones. Thus, the website has done more harm than good in including the numerous adds in between texts such that the reader cannot concentrate while reading the intended message.

The simply psychology website has, however, used proper visualization techniques such as readable font size, color, and use of plain background. The diagrams and images included in information also enable the reader to get the illustration with ease.

Week 3

Legalization of Marijuana

Marijuana is the product (dry leaves, sometimes along with stems and flowers) obtained from the plant Cannabis Sativa. Studies show that marijuana is the second most commonly abused drug in the United States after alcohol. With young people the most consumers. With the increase in the number of users, the concept of legalization of marijuana continues to grow in the United States. Most of the people who want it legalized support it for recreational purposes. Albeit marijuana has been found to have medicinal facts, and if authorized, it could prove to be an asset in the medical field (Cerdá et al., 2012).

Although the FDA has not approved marijuana as a wholly supported medicine, research has found that a chemical in marijuana known as cannabinoids resulted in the FDA approving two medications that contain this chemical in pill form. Despite the separate studies done on validating marijuana as a medicine, there have been no large-scale trials that can enable the FDA to approve marijuana as a drug. At the same time, several types of research have been done on the concept that researchers brought up in 1999 on the effects of marijuana on overdose opioids. Initially, it was thought that marijuana could reduce the effects of an opioid overdose. Subsequent research was done in 2010, and another similar study was done in 2017. It was later concluded that marijuana had little effect on opioid overdose, and the mortality rate of opioid overdose even rose to 22.7%. Also, though there are elements in marijuana that could have medicinal value, the term medical marijuana refers to marijuana as a whole without any removal of any component of the lab, being used as medicine to patients. This is the small hope that there is to legalize marijuana for its benefits (Joy, 1999).

On the other hand, marijuana is addictive, impairs memory, and causes hallucinations and even psychosis in some adverse cases. The long-term effect includes memory loss and reduced IQ. The idea of legalizing marijuana, therefore, stands upon the mercies of research and mass opinion. If the currently ongoing research gives a substantial report on its medicinal values and how it can be applied without leaving the patient with unwelcomed addictions, then marijuana can be legalized to be used for medical purposes.

Week 4

Analysis of Dissociative Fugue State in the Movie Borne Identity

Dissociative fugue is an example of reversible amnesia in which a victim experiences loss of critical information in the brain after a brain injury. Such crucial information includes personal identity, the memory of the past, and the person’s personality. As the person recovers from the brain injury, their concentration spun, and previous intelligence recovers. Inorganic amnesia, the patient’s identity, is not affected; neither is one’s personality. A doctor will diagnose a patient with dissociative fugue if the patient is examined and is found to have had any brain injury. However, the first main symptoms include victims feeling puzzled about their identity (Chaudhari et al., 2017).

In the movie The Bourne Identity, the protagonist finds himself in a boat in the Mediterranean. He cannot remember anything, including who he is and how he got to the boat. He begins to recover slowly as he recalls some of his past and his identity. Albeit when he’s found on the boat, the dissociative fugue is in its acute stage, Bourne can still remember his multilingual skills and some of his past he also can fight. These are skills that are complex motor skills that Bourne learned before getting amnesia (Baxendale, 2004).

This information proves Hollywood to be accurate this time. This is because, in organic amnesia, neurological memory damage is usually attributed to the medial temporal lobes in the brain. Yet someone’s habits and memory are generally not tampered with; they remain as they were before the amnesia attack. Subsequent movies show Bourne returning to where he had been in the past and remembering everything that took place before he found himself in the fishing boat with two shots (Gilroy, 2002).

References

Baxendale, S. (2004). Memories aren’t made of this: amnesia at the movies. Bmj, 329(7480), 1480-1483

Cerdá, M., Wall, M., Keyes, K. M., Galea, S., & Hasin, D. (2012). Medical marijuana laws in 50 states: investigating the relationship between state legalization of medical marijuana and marijuana use, abuse, and dependence. Drug and alcohol dependence, 120(1-3), 22-27.

Chaudhari, A. P., Mazumdar, K., Peste, S. N., Ramadas, D., & Gaikwad, A. (2017). Dissociative amnesia with dissociative fugue--a case report with 1-year follow-up. Journal of Evolution of Medical and Dental Sciences, 6(45), 3559-3561.

Gilroy, T., & Ludlum, R. (2002). The Bourne Identity. Directed by Doug Liman. United States/Germany: The Kennedy/Marshall Company.

Joy, J. E., Watson Jr, S. J., & Benson Jr, J. A. (1999). Marijuana and medicine. Assessing the Science Base. Washington DC: National Academy.

Lovinger, D. M., & Roberto, M. (2010). Synaptic effects induced by alcohol. In Behavioral Neurobiology of alcohol addiction (pp. 31-86).

McHale, N. (2011). An introduction to web accessibility, web standards, and web standards makers. Journal of web librarianship, 5(2), 152-160.

Rizzolatti, G., Riggio, L., & Sheliga, B. M. (1994). Space and selective attention. Attention and performance XV, 15, 231-265.

Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Stephanie, Watson."How Alcoholism Works" 8 June 2005.HowStuffWorks.com.

Valenzuela, C. F. (1997). Alcohol and neurotransmitter interactions. Alcohol health and research world, 21(2), 144.