Monday, 23 May 2016

Frontal Lobe

1st of all, sorry for not posting for so long. I have been busy with work stuff and practically had no time to write eventho I had tonnes of stories to tell you guys. Well lets get back to the story that I want to tell you today. Its a little bit informative so it might be a little boring since its my 1st time having to write blog about something so scientific.

A few days ago, I had a good talk with my good friend overseas. Her name is Wani, and she's happen to be a nurse in one of a hospital overseas. So while we are getting back to the usual stuffs, she did bring up a story about 1 of her patients who had his frontal lobe removed because of car accidents involving a truck and motorcycle. The victim happened to have a sharp poll of glass pierced to his head, damaging his frontal lobe in the accident. The accident overall was worst and most of the injuries that he receive would be on his head and because it was so critical at that time, the doctors decided to have his frontal lobe to be remove to at least prevents more "pendarahan" that could potentially happen to the other parts of the brain. If you don't know which part of frontal lobe then maybe this will help.



Wani also stated that during her intensive care treatment of the guy after his post-surgery, the guy happened to experience EXCESSIVE FEAR towards inanimate objects. He would sometimes shivering and screaming out of nowhere and not to mention his body would be dripped in sweat in anytime of the day. That is well of course took a few nurse to stabilize him until they tranquilize him to sleep. Even with that, during his sleep, he is said to experience nightmares every night to the point that he had to be moved to a more isolated room in the hospital, since hes basically "meracau" in his sleep,



At first when I heard about the story, I was quite surprised that there are still people that are able to survive without the whole frontal lobe. If you ask me a few days ago, about what if a person lost 30% of his front-part brain, I would say the victim would probably be dead. Well in any case, I found stuff like this to be very intriguing and because of that I get extremely curious about whats going on and like how it feels to be frontal lobeless. And there I was after 20 mins knowing about the news, finding myself in a site full of medical terms that's just mind boggling for a 0% knowledge-about-medic-stuffs guy like me. I find it funny tho that I'm able to hammer down all these weird medic stuffs into my head and progress through the journals 1 by 1 like I was reading a comic strip. Hahahaha. I'm quite surprise myself actually. Its just curiosity that droves me into researching,

And so I dug into the internet a little deeper about frontal lobeless patients.. It goes from reading multiple journals about pre-surgery patients to post-surgery patients on how they react after getting their frontal lobe removed.

In my research, I found that people getting their frontal lobes removed has a lot more profound impact on both mental and physical functions. It would come in whole slew of symptoms from motor-skill impairment to nervous system issues but the side effects that I and almost every single researching doctor was concern for today would all be psychological. Removal of frontal lobes significantly impacts the victims ability to process certain types of stimuli specifically FEAR stimuli!


Let me give you some backstory, In a good old 1950s, psychiatrist often thought the best way to cure problems with the brain, were to cut pieces out! Feeling depressed? Welp! lets cut that out! Overly aggresive? Meh~ that chunk probably wasn't important.

As such, there are extremely well-documented studies of patients without frontal lobes and whats fascinating about them is what happen to their FEAR response. Patients without frontal lobe became uninhibited because they NO LONGER have a FEAR response. Which means that what I heard from Wani telling me that her patients experiencing EXCESSIVE FEAR is basically impossible.

Knowing that on the line, I dug in more deeper on the medical world only to discover a story about 1 of the most famous accidental lobotomy in the history, Phineas Gage who literally had an iron rod pierced through his head, completely destroying his left frontal lobe. One of the most striking differences between pre-poll Phineas and post-poll Phineas was his sense of inhibition and by then I mean post-pole Phineas had NONE! He had no sense of caution, no sense of fear or self-consciousness. He was described to be impulsive to the point of being rude and vulgar in public.


No fear, no anxiety, no social pressure anywhere! Not to mention, a frontal lobe injuries also tempers with concentration, attention-span as well as imagination. Surely when I heard from Wani that her frontal lobeless patients kept experiencing fear must had something to do with imagination. A frontal lobe control a lot of mental processing abilities. From planning, judgement, language, problem solving, memories and of course IMAGINATION in this case DREAMS. Rigorous studies had been done on the imagination and dream states on lobotomized patients. While patients without frontal lobe can have dreams, but 1 thing they can't have is NIGHTMARES.

Patients missing a frontal lobe carry their lack of fear and inhibition, straight into their dreams. I mean geez, why not? It does make sense. If the mind isn't registering fear consciously, there's no reason to process it sub-conciously in a dream.

Studies shows that lobotomized patients can dream about idealistic scenarios. Money, Fame, Praises, but they can't dream about nightmares like monsters under the bed, which adds to my point that it is scientifically impossible for him to have that!

In fact, going back to the dark days of psychiatry, some patients that experience constant repeating nightmares actually have their frontal lobe INTENTIONALLY removed to stop those dreams from happening. There are also 1 famous case about a patients who experiences recurring dreams being chase by ferocious animals. After the patient receive the lobotomy in 1953, yes! He still have the dream but would instead describe it as being a nice dream, with some nice animals. His visions in the dream were no longer threatening. The animals were happy, he was happy and he no longer had to perceive any of the fear he once had prior to the surgery. So scientifically speaking, what Wani's patient experience is literally impossible.

Well I guess that was it. It does made me wonder about that patient and how he's able to still experience that. Maybe he had another injuries or maybe his frontal lobe was not completely removed. Well whoever he is, Wani, I hope he's okay and all the best for your patient, that is if you read my blog. Yeah, I did the whole research myself, don't be surprised hahaha. This is just plain me in my curious state.

So yeah guys, I guess thats all for today, do let me know if you love or hate this kind of posts. If you hate it, ill probably stop haha :3 Also, ill try to write more when I had the time, I promised ^_^

Tuesday, 22 March 2016

It's hot out there ಥ_ಥ


"Panas la Sam, Zarip nak beli chocotop dekat Macdonald jom!"

That's what I heard everyday from my little 6-year-old brother, Zarif, whenever we took him back from kindergarten. Trust me whenever he said that, we just had to bring him to the nearby MacD and order him a few nuggets and ice-cream for the treat and of course there's goes our RM10 note flying away everyday (⌣́_⌣̀) It was so frequent to the point where the drive-thru cashier recognize our face. Hahaha its just that frequent!

How can I resist, (-_-;) he always make that cute-smile face whenever he wants something and as a caring brother that I am (tangan ke bahu, mata ke atas) I just had to (-_-;)


That's him, he's also had the fairest skin compared to all of us.


Oh well, can't really argue with it since Malaysia itself has been hotter than usual these days. Even the insides of my house feel like a sauna during the day. No joke lol. So for those who feel like wanna sweat so much, just feel free to come to my house anytime! (^_^;) Haha

How hot you say? Well it is to the point where some schools and small establishments like kindergarten and nurseries were forced to close for like a few days due to a few cases of heat stroke that took place. My guess is its probably as a prevention measure took to avoid such things from happening again.



Well in any case, if you are somewhere in Malaysia or somewhere hotter than Malaysia make sure to drink a lot of water and keep yourself hydrated at all times ^_^ and to all my friends overseas do please take care of yourself.especially kau Ika (asyik sakit je, jaga diri leklok) that is if you reading this hehe ^_^

Saturday, 19 March 2016

Cats

Hi everyone! Yours faithfully is back on blog again

If you guys don't know or already know, I am someone who like love cats so much. I just can't seem to keep my hand in place and whenever I saw one, I tend to pet them on their head or play with bellies. How can't I? They are just so adorable, lovely little fluffy creatures. All of us in the family, Ammar, Zarif and my dad are very fond of cats. My mom and my big bro, Syafiq on the other hand, are afraid terrified of cats. I don't know why, but everytime the two of them saw one approaching them, they be like :-



Yeah, its true and I'm not even joking. Haha. There was this one time where we all are in a restaurant having a dinner at a nearby beach and there was this stray cat came to our table, meowing for food. It was all calm and cool, when Syafiq suddenly stood up from his seat. As he did so, his legs hit and messed up our drinks at the table. I was like :-

“Woah, kau apa hal? Okay tak? Macam kena letrik je”
“Tak, ada something lalu kat kaki aku, dia berbulu-bulu, kaki aku tak boleh benda bulu-bulu ni, dia allergic”
*Ammar interrupts* “Laa kucing je pon, dah macam cita The Mummy dah aku tengok”(get it? cuz the mummy hates cats) (I tried)
“Ish, Senyap ah kao, alih kan benda berkaki 4 tu cepat!”

And ever since that day, we knew he hated cats or at least gets terrified when approached by one. Soo knowing his weakness, we exploit it. LIKE A LOT! Why? Cuz we are such playful little devils, playing pranks to each other sometimes all the time. Its funny, cause I never thought I would meet someone who is afraid of cats and turns out its my own brother hahaha!

Anyway setting that aside, recently our pet cat, Genna recently gave birth to two lovely kittens a few weeks ago. 


Don't mind my dad at the back there hehe ^_^









Aren't they just adorable? I don't really have a name for these kittens yet but I do ask my friends for some suggestions and they replied with the weirdest answer ever...




In all seriousness, some of the names does look and sound ridiculous but whats funny is I even consider putting their name as Mat Yoe and Amri Yahya, just so that I could laugh whenever I had a bad day. Hahahahahha! But when I think hard about it, what would the surrounding neighbors think when I shouted their name to call them later? They would probably be like "Eh, ada Mat Yo ke mari sini?" Would have been super awkward. Hahaha! But all in all, I had to pick one by the end of the day, so I name the brown one as Jenny and the black one as J-Nab. 


And now time to scare my bro and my mum away muahaha..