The Nerve, 2015, Vol 7, Issue 1

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https://hdl.handle.net/2144/50681

Full Issue: The Nerve, 2015, Vol 7, Issue 1

Editors-In-Chief:Olivia Nguyen
Editors:Anna Oppermann, Brandon Bedell, Camila DeFreitas, Cindy Liu, Erin Ferguson, Nishitha Shekhar, Katharine Kolin
Artists & Layout Designers:Grace O’Donnell, Emily Yao, Jordan Puskas-Sullivan, Martinelli Valcin, Nic Larstanna, Sydney Crotts
Writers:Annalyse Kohley, Colin Stuart, James Thaney, Lily Whelan, Michaela Dwyer, Nishitha Shekhar, Raya Bidshahri, Srijesa Khasnabish, Zhenya Knyazhanskaya

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    The transgender brain
    (2015) Thaney, James
    Despite having always existed, transgender people have recently received widespread media attention. Gender dysphoria is a condition in which an individual’s physical gender conflicts with the gender they identify with. It is recognized by DSM-V, but its pathology is widely misunderstood. Once believed to be a psychiatric condition, more recent research suggests that the condition may be rooted in genetic and biological factors.
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    Living life in color
    (2015) Ferguson, Erin
    A lot of research has been done about how humans interact with their senses. A recent study suggests that humans sort colors in their working memories in categories of colors rather than as the unique hue. This suggests that the average human brain does not have specific memory associations for colors. It is hard to consider, then, that some people are able to make precise associations between senses. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more senses are merged together. Synesthesia can vary from colored hearing (varying from vowels to music to noises), to colored taste, and colored temperatures.
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    Austism & moral pesponsibility
    (2015) Bidshahri, Raya
    On January 28th 2009, a young man named Sky Walker beat his mother to death1. She was a professor at Kent State University and had previously written a public article about having to cope with Sky’s aggressive behavior. The dilemma here is that Sky Walker was a young man with Autism. Autism is not normally associated with violence and aggression, but as with any other legal case that involves a mental deficit, there is the question of whether a court can hold the accused at the same standard of accountability as the reasonable person.
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    Sonogenetics
    (2015) Stuart, Colin
    The human brain contains billions of neurons, which are brain cells that form intricate and complex connections with each other. Neurons use these connections to send electrical signals to each other, and this signaling forms a dense network of all brain activity. These neural networks allow the formation of behavior, thought, emotion, motor skills, and everything else controlled by the brain.
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    Machine learning at Harvard: when neuroscience and computer science converge
    (2015) Stuart, Colin
    When you open Netflix, a list of recommended movies pops up. When you listen to a song on Pandora, the site plays a stream of similar songs that it thinks you would like. After buying something on Amazon, the website will show products that you will likely buy next. How do all of these companies predict what you want next? They all use complex soft ware that allows companies to guess what a user will want next based on previous choices.Th is gives computers the ability to learn without being specifically programmed. In computer science, it’s is called machine learning, and it is a rapidly expanding field which could likely lead not only to better Netflix recommendations, but to truly artificial intelligence.
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    A multi-communal loss: remembering Oliver Sacks
    (2015) Dwyer, Michaela
    At the start of his career as a scientific researcher, Oliver Sacks was, in every sense of the word, a mess. After losing on two separate occasions both a notebook containing nine months of research, and a biological sample that took him ten months to collect, Dr. Sacks was told by his supervisors that he was a “menace” in the lab, and would do less harm by seeing patients (2). With these comments in mind, Dr. Sacks diligently pursued a career in neurology, eventually working his way to becoming a physician and professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine.
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    Artificial Intelligence
    (2015) Kolin, Katharine
    For centuries before the development of modern robotic and computer science, writers across cultures and continents have imagined in their works a mechanical companion that could perform myriad functions in humans’ stead. From famous classical literary figures such as Homer to Isaac Asimov, a penman of the Science Fiction revolution, Artificial Intelligence is an idea birthed from the ink on the page.
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    Love and addiction
    (2015) Crotts, Sydney
    I could begin this article by catching your attention with vivid, love-associated sensory details. I could describe the palm sweating nervousness of one’s first kiss or I could describe the earth- shattering heartbreak when your first crush likes someone else, but these details would do just that: catch your attention. These are details people unsurprisingly find interesting. In order to believe the details in this article, I need to make it clear that love is mostly controlled by responses in the brain rather than cupid throwing arrows.
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    Drug addiction
    (2015) Knyazhanskaya, Zhenya
    When mental illness afflicts close to 20% of the country’s adult working population, 1 and with more and more college students and working adults regularly using illicit or dangerously addictive drugs (NIH), a red flag must come up. If not for the relation between the two, then at least for the each problem individually that need to be addressed. As we find, however, the two often go hand in hand, especially in modern society.
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    The Nerve, 2015, Vol 7, Issue 1
    (2015) Knyazhanskaya, Zhenya; Crotts, Sydney; Kolin, Katharine; Dwyer, Michaela; Stuart, Colin; Bidshahri, Raya; Ferguson, Erin; Thaney, James