Yahoo!
المدونة التالية
كافة المدونات

new blog

كتبها Moataz ، في 13 أكتوبر 2007 الساعة: 03:38 ص

Well, this is my blog, finally up and running. I will start adding interesting articles in due time.

أضف الى مفضلتك
  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • LinkedIn
  • Live
  • MySpace
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis
  • YahooMyWeb
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
التصنيفات : غير مصنف |

The Female and Male brain

كتبها Moataz ، في 5 نوفمبر 2007 الساعة: 03:15 ص

Are there essential differences between the male and female brain?

the initial answer is yes. I will present some scientific research then discuss.
”Scientists working at Johns Hopkins University, recently reporting in the "Cerebral Cortex" scholarly journal (1), have discovered that there is a brain region in the cortex, called inferior-parietal lobule (IPL) which is significantly larger in men than in women. This area is bilateral and is located just above the level of the ears. The IPL allows the brain to process information from senses and help in selective attention and perception for example, women are more able to focus on specific stimuli, such as a baby crying in the night. Not only that but baby girls have been observed to typically have stronger reactions than boys to disturbing or distressful sounds.
In another research, a group from the University of Cincinnati, USA, Canada, presented  evidence that while men have more neurons in the cerebral cortex, women have a more developed neuropil, or the space between cell bodies, which contains synapses, dendrites and axons, and allows for communication among neurons (2). This research may explain why women are more prone to dementia (such as Alzheimer’s disease) than  men, because although both may lose the same number of neurons due to the disease, "in males, the functional reserve may be greater as a larger number of nerve cells are present, which could prevent some of the functional losses."
Furthermore Researchers at Henry Ford Health System have discovered evidence that suggests the male brain shrinks faster with age than the female brain. According to a study published in an issue of Archives of Neurology, brain shrinkage, which normally occurs with age, is more pronounced in men than in women. "We found that age-related shrinkage was greater for men in three regions of the brain that are involved in thinking, planning and memory,"
Research conducted at the Indiana University School of Medicine had found that men listen with only one side of their brains, while women use both, according to information on brain imaging presented Tuesday, Nov. 28, at the 86th annual (RSNA) meeting.

Yet, in another study Elizabeth Hampson of the University of Western Ontario showed that women’s performances at certain tasks changed throughout the menstrual cycle as levels of estrogen varied. High levels of the hormone were associated not only with relatively depressed spatial ability but also with enhanced speech and manual skill tasks. In addition, she says: ” I have observed seasonal fluctuations in spatial ability in men: their performance is better in the spring, when testosterone levels are lower”.

Finally, women incur aphasia (impairment of the power to produce and understand speech) more often after anterior damage than after posterior damage to the brain. In men, posterior damage more often affects speech. A similar pattern is seen in apraxia, difficulty in selecting appropriate hand movements, such as showin

المزيد

أضف الى مفضلتك
  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • LinkedIn
  • Live
  • MySpace
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis
  • YahooMyWeb
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
التصنيفات : غير مصنف |

Abortion: an in-depth analysis part I

كتبها Moataz ، في 18 أكتوبر 2007 الساعة: 09:15 ص

Introduction

The issue of abortion remains a controversial one between those who are in favour of it and those who oppose it on various grounds. This extended essay will examine some of the social, philosophical and religious issues associated with Abortion.The first part will deal with the philosophical aspects.
To being with, lets first define Abortion. From a medical perspective abortion is the removal of an embryo, better known as the fetus, and all its components (fetal membrane, placenta) from the uterus of the mother, resulting in death.


Furthermore abortion can be categorized into three different types. Spontaneous abortion, or miscarriage is often the result of deliberate human action. Therapeutic abortion is abortion performed  to: (1) save a woman’s life 1 , (2) maintain the women’s mental and physical health 1 and (3) terminate the pregnancy in case the child is born with a fatal disorder. 1


In the broader sense of terms, miscarriages may also include stillbirths and premature births. Therapeutic abortion can sometimes be referred to as Induced abortion since it is a result of artificial/medical procedures.




Philosophical aspects

The philosophical concerns with abortion stem from a deeper understanding of ethics and morality. Some popular questions are: is abortion right or wrong? or under what circumstances is the termination of pregnancy considered to be morally acceptable?
There is no clear answer to these questions. However the main center of conflict among the various views held is: At what point in the process does a human person come into existence? i.e. at what stage does human life begin? i.e when does the fetus have consciousness?
The question here is how strictly or loosely are we willing to define this ”person-hood” and ”life” . In some cases "life" refers simply to a form of "human life"— any kind of living entity which contains human DNA. A "human person" is thus a human life with full rights enjoyed by infants, children and adults. If we scale this argument to the fetus, then indeed the fetus is a ”human person” because it has a DNA of its own. But does that really make it equivalent to a human person?

المزيد

أضف الى مفضلتك
  • del.icio.us
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • LinkedIn
  • Live
  • MySpace
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • TwitThis
  • YahooMyWeb
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
التصنيفات : غير مصنف |