How social media affects the human brain.

Hello internet. This post is actually an assignment that my "professor" assigned me. So that means that this post is not my idea so that means that you don't have to read this if you don't want to and just wait a couple more days for the next post. So, off my research goes! [If you want to just look at the affects, skip the next three paragraphs]

Now, it's no secret that social media is dominating the communication methods of the younger generation (who am I to talk? I still relatively young).  Whether you're young or old, you're probably engaged in a social media site like Facebook or Twitter or other sites. These sites are now available almost everywhere; on tablets or phones or borrowed computers that we always forget to give back, your login page tends to be frequently accessed.

Studies show that over time, more and more teenagers will say that access to social media at work is more important than their work salary (how much they'll earn in work). Seriously?!

But, there finally is a reason why. It's because since humans love to boast about themselves and introduce themselves in a "awesome" way or talk about themselves to lots of other people, and that's what makes us addicted to social media sites. Users experience more euphoria (happiness) than over-the-phone interacting, eating, and "love-making". This is also why resisting social media is more harder than shopping/spending money, drinking, smoking, and sleeping (not the complete list).

Now to the actual facts.

Shortened attention spans; This is a real problem. Those who use social media are likely to have shorter attention spans. 25% of people forget names and details of friends and even relatives. 7% of people even forget their birthdays for a few minutes when they think about it. Most also forget pots and pans on the stove. In fact, in the UK last year, £1.6 million (~$2.4 million) of damage from forgotten pots on stoves.

Brain rewiring; So we know that our brain always adjusts and adapts to whatever we do. It doesn't just sit there; it's rewiring itself every day of our lives. A study done on 1000 people found out that they understood and comprehended a lot more when they read a text document than watching a video, since video and media are a major part of social media because video actually disrupts our concentration.

Hormone release; There is a hormone called "oxytocin" that stimulates trust and empathy. This hormone spikes when you log on, while this hormone is only supposed to be released when you have a face-to-face conversation. Too much release of this hormone can cause stress at different levels.

So yeah. Thanks for reading. Next blog post coming out in a couple days.

AT5s #2

Hello internet. Today the second post of the AT5s is here. In this post, I will be listing the rarest five diseases in the world, and you probably won't believe that last one, but whatever.

1. Foreign Accent Syndrome
This mental disorder causes the person to speak in an unrecognized dialect. It also causes a person that already has an accent to change his accent (like when George Michael, after waking up from a coma, spoke with a West Country British accent instead of his original North London accent). This syndrome usually results from actual brain damage. However, one case featured a Croatian speaker gained the ability to speak fluent German after suffering a coma. Only about 60 cases ever recorded.

2. Water allergy
This "allergy" causes the sufferer's skin to severely itch after coming into contact with water, shockingly. This "allergy" isn't actually an allergy because an allergy is the release of histamine when coming into contact with whatever the allergy is. This disease just makes the chemicals spike inside the sufferer's skin, not causing any histamine release. It makes the sufferer's skin to itch or burn, and sometime even may create hives on the skin. Only about 40 cases ever recorded.

3. F.O.P
Also known as "Stone Man Syndrome". This disorder in the body regeneration/repair system makes the joints in one's body slowly grow a layer of bone over it, making the joints permanently frozen in place. Surgical removal of extra bone growth causes the repair system to "repair" itself by growing more bone on the joint. Fail. Affects 1 in 2 million people.

4. Field's condition
This disease is thought to be the rarest disease in the world because it only affects two twins in the entire world. This disease causes muscle deterioration and (since this disease also affects the nerves) involuntary muscle movements. Very little is known about this disease. It is thought that the two twins will not make it through their teenage years.

5. Ribose-5-phosphate isomerase deficiency
This mental disorder causes a higher chemical production in the (get ready for this because this is a long phrase) "pentose phosphate pathway enzyme ribose-5-phosphate isomerase".  Only 1 person affected.

Short prayer.

That's not me, but I would do the same thing.

Hello internet. Before I talk about this topic, I would like to pray to the Boston Marathon Disaster. Please, do not ignore. Currently 3 people died, and more than 100+ are wounded. May this forever be in our prayers.

An awesome disease?

Hello internet. Today I will be talking about a disease that is more like a superpower; a disease that I actually want to have. Hmm. Never thought I'd want a disease. But this here is an exceptional exception. This disease is known as Synesthesia.

This is a mental disorder (not in my book, more like a mental enhancer). Now, synesthesia is kind of hard to explain without taking up a whole lot of space, so I'm going to explain it in a bit simpler terms.

Imagine if the brain is a computer. Imagine if the senses are just cables plugged into ports. In a healthy individual, the cables are plugged into the right ports. (e.g. hearing into ears, seeing into eyes, etc.). However, in an individual that has synesthesia, the cables are plugged into the wrong ports, or vice versa. That means that they might "smell songs" or "hear sights". Or they can experience two or more simultaneously. Like my favorite symptom, "seeing and hearing music". However, they can't actually control the symptoms. Synesthesia is involuntary and automatic.

Although synesthesia is considered to be a "neurological condition/disorder", this condition isn't actually even in the DMV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder) nor the
ICD (International Statistical Classification of Diseases) because this condition usually does not interfere with the brain's normal daily functioning. In fact, people with synesthesia recall past memories far more vividly than a person without synesthesia.

Here are some of the symptoms of it.

• Grapheme-color symptom.

In this form of synesthesia, individual letters and numbers are shaded or tinted differently from its original color. For example, the letter "A" which is black might appear red to a synesthesia sufferer.

• Sound-color symptom.

This form is one of the most brilliant one. In this form, a certain sound can produce a wide range of colors, from just little polka dots to bright and luminous fireworks.

• Linguistic personification.

This form is quite unusual. It gives the person the ability to "identify the 'personalities' of letters and numbers." For example, a real person with this form said "T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures. 4 is honest, but 3, I cannot trust. 9 is a gentleman, tall and graceful, but politic under his suavity." So yeah.

• Lexical-gustatory symptom.

This is a rare and unique form. In this form, the pronunciation of certain words makes the sufferer perceive a certain taste. I once met a guy the has this form, and whenever I say "starch", he gets a taste of potatoes in his mouth. Kind of makes sense, if you think about it.

• Auditory-tactile symptom.

This is actually the rarest form (as of February 2013) of synesthesia. In this form, sufferers, after hearing a certain tone, will cause numbness/tingling in a limb.

• Mirror touch symptom.

This form is the second rarest form of synesthesia (as of February 2013, again) and one of the weirdest. When sufferers see other people getting touched, the sufferer will also perceive that touch in the same region, with the same force. The downside is when the sufferer sees people receive pain, they are likely to receive pain too.

Well, that's that. See you all later!

Interesting fact of the day: "Four" is the only number that has the same amount of letters in its value.
[That means that the word "four" has four letters, and no other number is. "One" has three letters. "Two" has three letters. "Five" has four letters. However, "four" has four letters.]

AT5s #1

Hello internet. Today, I'm starting a new series called AT5s. It stands for "All Time 5s". It's a series that will be posted once per week. In these posts, I'll post the top five of "whatever the topic is". So if the topic is "weirdest events that happened at Earth (which is the topic today)", I'll post the top five of the "weirdest events that happened in history".

1. The Bloop
The Bloop was an, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) described it, an ultra-low extremely powerful frequency under the ocean. They have calculated that the object has to be at least ten times the size of the largest animal in the world, the blue whale, to make a sound like that. Their sensors detected it multiple times at least 10 miles under the ocean.

2. Japan Airlines Flight 1628 Incident
Japan Air Lines flight 1628 was a UFO incident that occurred on November 17, 1986 involving a Japanese cargo jumbo freighter aircraft. The aircraft was en route from Paris to Tokyo with a cargo of wine. On the Reykjavik to Anchorage section of the flight, at 5:11 PM over eastern Alaska, the crew saw two unidentified disk-shaped objects to their left. These abruptly rose from below and closed in to right next to their aircraft. Each had two rectangular arrays of what appeared to be glowing nozzles or thrusters, though their bodies remained obscured by darkness. When the captain is asked about that flight, he only states "We had to get away from that object."

3. The case of Gil Perez
Gil Perez was a member of the Filipino Guardia Civil in Manila, Philippines. One day, he felt tired and decided to lean against a wall. When he leaned against it he, as a witness described it, got "sucked into" the wall and disappeared Gil Perez reappeared literally a second later at the Mexico City's Plaza Mayor, leaving him very confused. He was more than 13,500 kilometers from where he was a second ago.

4. The mysterious radiation burst
A team of biologists were studying Japanese cedar trees. However, they noticed that when the trees' trunk was cut, revealing the rings, the rings had be severely disordered. Using dendrochronology, they found out they'd been like that ever since 774-775 AD. Only one type of force can make the ring of the tree look like that; radiation. A lot. Every living thing has a isotope called carbon-14. However, using biochemistry, they found that in a lot of trees, the carbon-14 has been heavily increased due to a burst coming from the Northwest, where the UK is. The reason why I mention the UK is because the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions a "huge, bright, blinding red cross filled the skies of Britain" during 774 AD.

5. Dyatlov Pass incident
A group of nine hikers went to hike on a trail which is now known as the "Mountain of the dead". Why? Here's why. The group went to hike on the east shoulder of the mountain. It reached dusk, so they decided to camp out for the night. However, the next day, all nine of the campers were dead. The military and their relatives didn't find this out until a couple days later because they were noticing that they still didn't come back. Then they found out that then didn't even reach their destination yet. Rescuers found all of them in the snow. They found that they were trying to get out of their camp in a hurry. The tents were found to be cut open from inside. They found six of them pretty far away from the campsite, thinking they could run away. But all of them were buried in the snow, with their skins all stripped from their bodies, exposing many broken bones. More investigation found the other three, which didn't have a better fate than the other six. Their skin had prematurely aged, their skulls were cracked and exposed, they had (interestingly) burn marks on their clothes and hair. One of them even had their tongue missing. Researchers couldn't find a possible explanation for the causes of these deaths. Even further investigation found more interesting factors. But two stand out the most. Number one was that there was a great deal of scrap metal in that area. Number two was that their clothes were found to be highly radioactive. Jeez.

Well that ends it. Please note that I will not be posting an "interesting fact of the day" in any of the AT5 series. Sorry. But comment if you want me to, and maybe I'll reconsider.