Joe McNamara

–Cocaine abuse and how it rewires the brain –Cerebrovascular medicines –Learning disorders

I added this whole subsection to my article. There was no previous information on cocaine abuse.

Frequent cocaine users have been shown to have lower than normal activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. When asked to perform certain tasks that rely heavily on activation of this area of the brain, the cocaine users perform worse and have less prefrontal cortex activation than the control subjects. ^[1] The quantity of cocaine used was found to be inversely proportional to the level of activation. ^[2]

The prefrontal cortex is also physically effected by cocaine use. Chronic use has been shown to lead to a decrease in the amount of gray matter in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The decrease in gray matter and effect on behavior is analogous to a person having lesions throughout their medial prefrontal cortex ^[3]. Specifically, the pyramidal cells of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex are known to be linked with drug seeking behaviors. ^[4] Both an increased and decreased level of activity in these pyramidal cells has shown to lead to extinction of cocaine-seeking behaviors depending on when the activation takes place. Inactivation of these cells was needed to inhibit cocaine-seeking behavior after a longer duration of time, whereas activation was required to reduced the behavior soon after using cocaine. ^[5]

I was definitely a supporter for this assignment. Although it was sometimes rough figuring out what was expected or what exactly needed to be done, it was a good learning experience. I have never had an assignment like this and I definitely prefer it to a paper. Although I will probably not continue to edit wiki, I felt I learned a valuable skill that most of my friends and peers will not have. The biggest problem I encountered was finding an article, but that may just be the perfectionist in me talking. I was trying to find an article that had almost no information and also that I was interested in or could find information on. It was difficult to find a relevant article on something we have learned this year that was not already well studied and documented. Most of the stubs I found were about random bits of information that were not well researched, so I could not add more information to the page. I also ran into a problem with having a topic covered on various pages. There were a couple topics I wished to write about, and found a stub for, but would search another term or related subjects and find it was already well documented. I have also never done any coding on a computer and figuring out the wiki “language” was sometimes confusing. Overall, it was not too difficult and I thought the assignment was a constructive and thoughtful assignment.