Editing the Paper

After consulting with Mrs. Haag (hi Mrs. Haag) about revising my paper, we decided to add in the nuanced differences that I found with gender, age, and individual questions. Also, I used to think that literally nobody besides Mrs. Haag (hi again) was reading this blog, but 25 people viewed my blog yesterday. That might not sound like a lot of people, but I’m really surprised considering that it had literally zero views for a period of time. What happened? Really, if you aren’t affiliated with BASIS Scottsdale in any way I’d like to know how you found out about this blog. Well also, I posted my blog on Facebook a month ago since a lot of other people in the class were and I thought that was what the school encouraged, so you’re probably just my friend on Facebook. Regardless...

All right, so what I had to do in the first place was go through every single survey and input the answers to each question. There were 50 surveys with 9 questions each. According to my calculations... that means I went through and typed in data for 450 questions. For science!

Then I had to go through each survey and mark whether a male or female filled it out, with his or her respective age. When I initially started surveying people, I did not think that age and gender was a factor in my research. Then, I Skyped my research consultant Bob one day and we decided that the results would be more meaningful if we did in fact include age and gender. Since I had all of the consent forms aligned with the respective survey, I knew who filled out which survey. I went through and assigned gender to each survey and age range. I had a lot of exact ages since a lot of the people I surveyed were 18, but I put the parents in the 40-50 age range. This week, I actually emailed the parents asking for their exact ages, and I got those. I’m scared of asking teachers at my school for their exact ages, though. I think that if I did that then my school would get frustrated with me, since they did not want me to survey teachers in the first place because of confidentiality reasons. So if I found out how old Mr. X is... can you even imagine all of the gossip that would go down? (None. Seriously none. But that’s obviously beside the point.)

Then, once I entered all of the data into a Google spreadsheet (shoutout to Mrs. Haag and that one sentence I wrote in my paper when I was like “This graph was made in a Google spreadsheet”) Bob and I found correlations. The correlations are.... a surprise!! Come back next week and I’ll talk about all of the data. If you’re really interested though you can obviously email me or message me or whatever you’d like, I just need to keep this a surprise on the blog so that I have something to write about next week.

Have a great week!

Word Count: 517

Beginning the Presentation

Now that the paper is finished, it's time that I focus on the other part of AP Research: the presentation. Presenting should be a fun experience (I've watched too many TED Talks), and I hope to engage the audience. The question is, though, how do I do this? I need to find a way to make people interested in something they do without even thinking about - blinking. I also need to hold their attention so that they're engaged when I talk about dopamine, and to discuss it so that the audience doesn't feel like they're in a middle school biology class (or this class below in SpongeBob).
 

In order to make people interested, I have decided that what I have to do is begin by talking about the thing that everyone cares about: themselves. No, I'm not just trying to be cynical; it's human nature. The underlying central theme around my paper and around the question I posed has to do with the fact that the majority of who we are and the decisions that we make are not really up to us, but up to our brain chemistries and unconscious. The fact that dopamine plays such a large role in behavior makes one think about how much he or she can control oneself. How would you behave if you had an abnormal amount of dopamine? Would you impulsively gamble or set fires? Much of who we are is determined by how our brains are wired.


So, when I start the presentation, I think I'm going to talk about the question regarding whether we possess free will. How much free will do we really have when so many of our decisions are based on the chemistry of our brains? Then, I'm thinking of talking about how there is so much that we don't know about what drives our behavior, and the implications this has across many fields. For instance, this could have profound implications for the law. Who's to say one is culpable of committing a crime if someone has an abnormality in his or her brain? (However, reaching too far with this concept could be detrimental to the legal system, since then anyone could use the argument that they're not really in charge of their decisions).


After discussing this in the opening, I can then turn to why I chose to study dopamine. I'll go into the details of everything dopamine does, and why it is so important to understand its capabilities and everything it does. Once I relate how my research has to do with everyone and their minds, I think people will be more inclined to listen and be engaged. Maybe I'll try and tell jokes. Probably shouldn't do that though. I have puns! I've realized that puns make some people are really angry though, so I think I'll stay away from those too...(nah.).

In the meantime, I'm going to go shopping for something I can wear for the presentation. I need to look professional, and I think I'm going to buy new shoes.


Thanks for reading and I'll post again next week!
Word Count: 518

The Academic Conversation

Hellooooo... Welcome to my fifth blog post! This week I found a shirt that everyone in senior year should buy, even though I didn't buy it myself.

 
I don't know what I'm doing with my hand in this picture, and yes, I know that the letters are backwards in the mirror, but I was reminded of this wonderful blog as soon as I saw the shirt. I knew I had to take a picture and post it on here to advocate for this blog.

In the spirit of "why don't you blog about it" shirts everywhere, let's begin and talk about how my results could actually mean something in life! All right, this might come as a shock, but I didn't take videos of people to sit there and watch them blink just for fun.



I did it because...

Understanding how blink rate indicates certain behavior and mental states is important because it offers a sort of gateway into the brain. The reason behind all of this, and what this paper is really all about is the neurotransmitter dopamine, as I've mentioned before.

Professionals could be able to tell if one is more impulsive based off of blink rates, and this could be useful for a myriad of mental disorders. An example would be Impulse Control Disorders, or ICDs. Some ICDs include pathological gambling, kleptomania (impulsive stealing), pyromania (impulsively setting fires), and intermittent explosive disorder, which is pretty self explanatory (aggressive and explosive outbursts).

Certain treatments could work better if researchers are able to tell the root causes of these behaviors, and could focus on treating the dopamine abnormality that is present in affected brains. 

Also, I've mentioned before that understanding how dopamine affects the brain is important because it could help overcome disorders such as anxiety and schizophrenia.

A study done by German researchers shows that anxiety is linked to dopamine in relation to the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that deals with fear and anger. The findings of this study suggest a new way of approaching anxiety disorders, which currently affect almost 20% of adults in the United States, according to the DANA Foundation. The German scientist Thomas Kienast led a group of researchers in Berlin in a study that examined how dopamine affects the amygdala. Through using PET and fMRI, the scientists found that those with more dopamine stored in their left amygdalas, which tend to invoke fear more than the right amygdala, were more anxious.


According to the Schizophrenia Research Forum, the most established hypothesis for the cause of schizophrenia is the dopamine hypothesis. Schizophrenia is an immensely complex disorder, and dopamine does not seem to be the only answer, but research shows that there is a direct relationship between excess dopamine levels and schizophrenic behavior and symptoms. This hypothesis provides a large implication for the treatment of schizophrenia. Currently, treatments are focused around abnormal neurotransmitter levels. Further research with dopamine suggests that future treatments should revolve around specific factors that focus on where a dopaminergic funnel point, where dopamine is concentrated.

There is so much more to be discovered! It's truly exciting, and if you're interested in this then there are plenty of articles on research that's been conducted recently and now about all of this. Just google dopamine and how it impacts the brain and certain disorders and you'll be busy reading for a long time.

Thanks for reading this, and I hope you come back for my sixth blog post.



Word Count: 580