Psych 1010 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Psych 1010 - Essay Example This was interesting to me because it laid out pretty clearly exactly how reward pathways work and how a lot of stuff in the brain goes on. The Beyond the Reward Pathway was interesting for the same reason, because it explained how drugs do what they do. Although I have seen plenty of movies or books where the characters are on drugs, and know some of the stereotypes about how people behave, it was really interesting to see the actual chemical reactions and problems that lead to that behavior. Beyond the Reward Pathway was the most educational, especially when coupled with the Mouse Party game. Both of these together taught me exactly how specific drugs cause specific behaviors in people, and the mouse party game really made it come together well by showing the actual behaviors in the mouse you picked. For instance, after playing the mouse game I learned that the reason cocaine makes its users so twitchy is because the drug causes problems in the part of the brain that deals with vol untary movements. I also learned from the Reward Pathway article about the different types of pathway in the brain, such as the Dopamine, Tuberoinfundibular, and Nigrostriatal pathways, among others. Each of these has different purposes and different effects on how the brain operates. Although the mad scientist game and the cerebral commando games were interesting, they each had their drawbacks. The mad scientist game just took too long to start up. There was too much boring information at the start which had nothing to do with anything and I couldn't skip it. The commando game didn't really teach me much, and was kind of difficult to use. The way it flashed was also annoying. The game I enjoyed the most was the mouse party game, again. It wasn't really much of a "game" but I still enjoyed picking the mice based on their actions and then looking at the slides to see exactly how each of their actions was caused. It was also interesting to know why mice are used all the time in resear ch and experiments. For instance, the website says that mice have about 60% of the same genes as a human being, which seems strange. However, this is why they make good test subjects. For research about brain chemistry and drug reactions, mice are even more of a good fit because the brain is built in the same way, and even uses dopamine and other reward pathways in the same way. I learned this from the "Mice are Good Model Organisms to Study Addiction" article. The reason so much of the website talked about Dopamine is that this is how a lot of drugs function. They either, like cocaine, block the dopamine transporters, or interact with the chemical in other ways. Since Dopamine is how our brain registers pleasure, it plays an important role in how we become addicted to things. When we feel good, we remember that and then want to feel good again. So we become addicted because of the way drugs interact with dopamine. Because the website is all about the science of addiction, it is nat ural that it would talk a lot about dopamine more than other parts of the brain's