Drug Use and Neurotransmitters – “This is Your Brain on Drugs”
Recreational drugs are prevalent in many places – school, college, work and so on. The chapter on biological foundations of behavior discusses the importance of the neurotransmitters that carry neural messages. These messages can either enhance the effects of some neurotransmitters, or they can block the reuptake of neurotransmitters. The title of this assignment is from a commercial about drug use and brain effects from the 1980s. I have included it below. Please watch it prior to doing the assignment.
Classic frying pan video
This following brief video will help you visualize the location of neurons in the brain, and the purpose they serve.
The Neuron
The following video, on neurotransmitters should help you see first hand and better understand the path that neurotransmitters take in the brain.
2-Minute Neuroscience: Synaptic Transmission
Consider all that you have read in the chapters on biological psychology, the videos you watched here and the crash course ones about the nervous system, neuron and particularly synapses. Now that you know more about neurons and neurotransmitters, I would like you to consider how drugs affect our brains and functioning.
Use one of the search engines on our school library web site to get information about how recreational drugs affect the brain. Look up a drug that may have been used by you, your peers or family members at some point. Make sure that you use sources that are peer reviewed. These are articles by research psychologists, writing for professional readers.
Your research paper should be at leastthree full pages, double spaced and should respond to all of the issues below. The text of the document only is included in the three full pages – meaning there should be at least three pages of substantive content, the reference page will be the 4th page, and you should use at least 2 peer reviewed sources. The paper may be longer, it may not be shorter. In text citations and references at the end should be in APA style.
Discuss your findings about how the drug interacts with the neurotransmitters in the brain. Please make sure that you include citations (and/or URLs) for the sources. Please make sure that you write your paper in your own words.
How does the drug you studied affect cognition – memory, thinking, reaction time etc? Discuss both the long term and short term cognitive effects.
What happens when you stop taking the drug? What are the short term and long term effects of taking this drug.
Does it have addictive properties? If so, how do the addictive properties evidence themselves.
Finally conduct an in depth critical analysis of the personality and functionality impact of the drug use on those who you know that have been affected by the drug, or on what you had heard about the drug in the past.
Please understand that once you upload your document, it will go through an originality check, that will show us both that you wrote the paper in your own words. Please note that while you may not see it on the originality report, Turnitin does alert me to whether you used AI to write your paper.
