The Nerve, 2024-2015

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https://hdl.handle.net/2144/50703

Full Issue: The Nerve, 2024-2015

Editors-In-Chief:Alexa Woodrow, Randall Erwin
Head of Marketing:Manya Jain
Head of Design:Melissa Park
Managing Editor:Lorenzo Gatt
Editors:Aiyanna Medina, Alexia Oliveira, Laura Dood, Pere Cabus Carrera, Analiese Godin, Ayjia Stanford, Divta Sivakumar, Karishma Sivakumar ivakumar Jennale, Halima Mohamed, Cameron Chieppo, Nethra Sundaram, Sophia Lombardo, Yannis Chen, Yusuf Chaudhry
Designers:Freya Nath, Agasthya Kamath, Laura Dodd, Pere Cabus Carrera, Maya Zubrinsky, Halima Mohamed, Cameron Chieppo

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    Tangled roots, twisted truths
    (2024) Jain, Manya
    There once was an ancient and vast forest. Trees stood tall like sentinels, with their roots deeply tangled in the earth’s memory. Much like the hippocampus, it stored every tale whispered by the wind. The air hummed with the quiet rustling of leaves and birds. A harmony of knowledge passed from season to season. But this peaceful expanse was interrupted by a single seed of information that drifted down from the sky. Small and unnoticed, it nestled into the soil. The warmth from the sun and the breath of the wind made this little seed grow.
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    Buddhism and hume
    (2024) Mulla, Aliyah
    There is something that is equally daunting, invigorating, and enlightening in attempting to question the things that we take for granted most in this world. And there is something equally daunting, invigorating and enlightening in juxtaposing two diverging but not dissimilar views on these subjects in an attempt to create some semblance of valuable philosophical discourse. While superficially there is little in common between an 18th century philosopher from Edinburgh and a 2000-year-old Indian belief system, David Hume and the Buddhist tradition both seem to challenge our notions of causation and the self in astonishingly similar, albeit distinctly complex ways. Through this paper, I aim to briefly touch upon the Buddhist notion of causation in contrast with Hume’s notion of causation, and subsequently explore how these contribute to similar conceptions of the self and personal identity. I will do so primarily with the help of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Malcolm David Eckel’s Bhāviveka’s Arguments for Reincarnation, Amber Carpenter’s Indian Buddhist Philosophy, and Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism.
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    Cortex in color
    (2024) Lombardo, Sophia
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    SPIN: the future of pain perception
    (2024) Eyassu, Jordan
    What if the brain’s response to pain wasn’t just a simple alarm system, but instead was part of a complex web of regions working together? Imagine a future where understanding the complexity of the pain response allows us to target mental illness and neurological disorders with unprecedented precision. While the development of new treatment brings risks and “what-ifs,” our knowledge of the pain response remains riddled with mysteries and ambiguity. As we continue to perceive the brain, we realize there is so much we don’t know about perception itself.
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    Modern AI and an extended turing test
    (2024) Libman, Gabriel
    Bypassing somewhat the large controversy around it, we can say that the Turing test is a pragmatic one. That is, it is properly organized so that we may effectively answer the question, “can a machine think?” without necessarily being dragged into the hard questions of mind and consciousness that we have been grappling with for the past hundred years or so (and arguably longer). The test purports to answer this simple yet inconveniently nuanced question by proposing that if a machine can properly make a human believe it itself is human, then we may say and even believe that it in fact thinks. But, as one might expect when it comes to such a seismic matter, various forms of dissent have emerged from the idea that we may rightly say that some machine is a thinking thing.
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    Untouchable love
    (2024) Panichi, Isabella
    A man and a woman attend an engagement party. They are introduced through mutual friends and are immediately enamored with each other. The night is warm and lovely—the perfect setting when recounting this story for others. Sheepishly, he asks for her number after hours of enthralling conversation.When he texts her, walking through the door of his own apartment, she responds right away. They begin to see each other more often, cooking together, attending concerts, and going for long, meandering drives. Sometimes, they meet for a coffee in the afternoon, and, somehow, she always finds herself in his apartment at night. They begin to reveal everything, their pool of knowledge becoming somewhat synonymous. He recounts his anxiety riddled childhood, and she tells him of her grandmother’s passing. He compiles musical playlists for her and leaves notes in the margins of the books she lends him. She composes extensive letters and dries out the flowers he brings to her. Together they have five Valentine’s Days, five Christmases, and five birthdays. There is the birth of her first niece and his brother’s wedding, all events they experience within the context of each other. They are in love.
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    Values in psychotherapy: a catalyst for behavior change
    (2024) Kinch, Samuel
    There is nothing more important for humans than the pursuit of what gives our lives meaning. Our personal values can serve as our guiding principles, defining who we are and directing where we go next. For the most passionate of our values, many would face great suffering or even death in the knowledge that they would be fulfilled. In 2011, a street vendor in Tunisia doused himself in paint thinner and lit himself on fire in an effort to stand up against decades of oppression and corruption in his country, setting off the Arab Spring. Many activists have since followed, trying to change a world they would never see. Values have the power to guide our behavior without external reinforcement, allowing ordinary actions to bring us deep satisfaction (Berghof et al. 2018). No other motivator has the ability to make actions as extreme as death seem reasonable. It is not surprising, then, that the identification and use of personal values are essential in understanding psychological well-being and for motivating meaningful change in our lives (Hoyer et al. 2019).
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    Inside the spectrum: the different faces of autism
    (2024) Giram, Rabiat
    “This nuanced charcoal and black chalk drawing captures the complexities of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) through a series of expressive figures, each embodying different aspects of the spectrum. The composition highlights the individuality of those with ASD, emphasizing that no two experiences are identical. Varying in intensity, the depicted traits range from non-verbal communication and sensory sensitivities to hyperactivity and subtle social difficulties. The artwork also integrates elements representing management strategies, offering a visual exploration of support mechanisms such as structured routines, therapy, and sensory accommodations. Through its layered textures and dynamic contrasts, this piece conveys both the challenges and the diverse strengths of individuals on the spectrum.”
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    In defense of objectivity: pursuing truth with respect to core cognition
    (2014) Chieppo, Cameron
    It is a necessary truth of human existence that every experience we are able to perceive must be filtered first through our senses, which must then be interpreted by the brain. Our perceptions are inherently biased by our very biology; each individual’s reality is merely an approximation of events that are limited and altered by their body’s biological hardware. We obtain information from experience which we necessarily must integrate within individual conceptual frameworks, as our own perceptions are all we may ever know. But there are universal qualities that are retained across all humans—including our unique ability for higher-order logical reasoning and complex inquiry. Logic and reason themselves draw their sources from our external environments; the existence of the outside world underlies all things, even if we may not ever be able to fully understand its intricacies as biological beings. Even still, the consciousness that our brains have bestowed upon us struggles to understand how we may arrive at objective truths in a world that is necessarily filtered through perceptual bias. Modernist thought in the philosophy of science explains that there exists objective truth which we find coherent, even in spite of our inherent cognitive limitations. Reaching objective truth is only possible because we are rational beings—it is our capability to use reason which defines a central “core cognition” retained across the human species. This cognitive core is an intrinsic quality within all humans that allows us to understand the outside world separately from our lived experience by using logic and rationality. We may accept the existence of coherent, objective truths describing reality despite our brain’s subjective interference by maintaining that our consciousness allows us to justify empirical observations in relation to a rational cognitive core–a trait which itself lies central to the universal human experience.
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    Neural overlap in sexual and aggressive behaviors: exploring focal brain regions and implications for psychiatry
    (2024) Acosta, Hailey; Upal, Somayya
    This paper delves into the identification of focal brain regions governing both sexual and aggressive behavior, with a specific focus on unraveling the neural networks that underlie their shared relation. We begin by providing a brief history on the study of sexual and aggressive behaviors, which further allows for a review of existing literature and empirical studies. We aim to pinpoint the mechanisms in key brain regions, namely the hypothalamus and amygdala, that play roles in the regulation of both sexual and aggressive behaviors. Building on these findings, we explore potential mechanisms that might explain the observed convergence in neural networks and its implications for understanding the complex interplay between sex and aggression. Furthermore, we discuss the broader implications of these findings for the field of psychiatry, proposing that a deeper understanding of the neural substrates of these behaviors could inform therapeutic interventions and shed light on the etiology of certain psychiatric conditions.
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    The Nerve, 2024-2015
    (2014) Acosta, Hailey; Upal, Somayya; Chieppo, Cameron; Giram, Rabiat; Kinch, Samuel; Panichi, Isabella; Libman, Gabriel; Eyassu, Jordan; Lombardo, Sophia; Mulla, Aliyah; Jain, Manya