Awakenings This week we finished up our section on audition. We also watched Awakenings, a movie starring Robin Williams and Robert DiNero about a doctor (Williams) who works in a psychiatric hospital and gives Leonard (DeNiro) L-dopa to help wake him up from his catatonic psychological state. The drug works, and Leonard and the other patients on the wing are "awakened" to their lives from which they have been absent for about twenty years. The tragedy is that the "wonder" drug turns out to be not as wonderful as it was originally thought to be.
I think the film emphasizes the importance of being innovative and creative in treatment of psychiatric disorders. For example, Williams' character noted that one of the patients would start walking towards the window then stop when her visual field "stopped." He used a marker to color in the rest of the tiles leading up to the window, and the women walked the whole way there. Also, it was he who noticed that all the patients in his ward had suffered polio, and it was he who proposed the possible causal connection between polio and the strange catatonic states of his patients.
Another important message I derived from this movie was the importance of communication between physicians. For example, it would have been discovered much sooner that the patients all had suffered from polio if the doctors had not only thoroughly read the patients' files but conversed with their previous doctors. Also, I think it's a good idea to have professional networks where doctors can communicate about unclassifiable symptoms their patients are showing; in this way, diagnosis and treatment could be facilitated and expediated.
Now, on to bats.
The textbook chapter for this unit cites the work of James Simmons, who investigates echolocation in bats. In echolocation, bats emit sounds that are reflected, or "echoed," off objects. Bats use these echos to locate objects without seeing. Basically, extracting these auditory cues about things in visual space is the bat's means of interpreting objects in their environment, just as most humans see with their eyes. Echolocation
How exactly does echolocation work? Bats emit ultrasonic pulses and change the structure of these pulses as they get close to obejcts. Echolocation is used specifically for such things as finding prey and more generally as a means for learning about what's in the environment.
Some bat links!
So I was curious about bats and echolocation, and found some Web sites that you might be interested in. Just click on the name of the site, and my links will take you there. The University of Bristol uses echolocation recordings and microphones to study bats and echolocation. Check it out