the only thing the human brain can't understand:

Obviously itself. We know so much about the physiology of every other organ in our body. We know so much about the first three minutes of the universe when everything was radiation dominated and atoms couldn't form. We know more about the nature of spacetime and cosmology in general than we know about our own minds (brains?).

On a good day, that's exciting to me. There's so much left undiscovered in the field of neuroscience, and that unappreciative gap between cognitive science and neuroscience. On a bad day (like today), that just seems overwhelming. I feel like we'll never understand all of these mechanisms in our brains. It's not like something in physics that takes a sudden insight to all fall into place. Everything's complicated in neuroscience. So many things are impossible to understand, and so many aspects are impossible to model experimentally due to the complexity of everyday life. It's crazy.

An example of this is the occlusion of learning by previous learning. I pick this example because I feel like it has happened to me, although I am assured by my neuroscience professor that such a thing is impossible (it would require the saturation of every synapse in my hippocampi). However, I feel like every synapse in my hippcampi has reached its excitatory maximum, its information threshold. In such a case, further learning is occluded. Why? We don't really know. One way to occlude learning is previous maximum phosphorylation in the postsynaptic spine (since phosphorylation drives so many processes involved in potentiation, saturating the phosphorylation by inhibited phosphotases for instance yields a maxed out post synaptic density). But that's only one way. We have no idea what other mechanisms may be involved, or what role such saturation has to play in normal behavior (although I am convinced it is the reason I can stuff no more information into my brain before my test tomorrow and my test Wednesday). And there's no promising way to experimentally figure that out in the near future.

That's just one mechanism of a million in the study of long-term potentiation, and long-term potentiation is just one effect of millions in the study of the brain. Hopeless.

On a side note, the tree outside my window has turned a beautiful rustic red (if I remember correctly this is because the chlorophyll that reflects light of the green wavelength dies out in the fall, leaving other photopigments to control the coloration of the leaf as it slowly dies and falls to earth). The tree next to it is still largely a hearty green, but the very peripheral edges next to the red tree are also turning red. It looks as if the red tree has a communicable disease that is slowly spreading to the surrounding foliage.

How interesting, to think of beauty as a communicable disease. Or is it death, primarily?

thought

I wonder what happens when two people walk, and neither one knows where they are going but each assumes the other does. Each feels as if he is following, but neither is leading. Strange. How does direction result? And yet such wandering does seem directed...

Chavez's dominoes

Disclaimer: the second I start talking about economics or politics, I am on shaky ground. I am a neuroscience major, and anything I know about anything other than science and philosophy and high school knowledge is from personal study and not expertise.
That said...
"The Economist" tells me that because Brazil won't stand up to Chavez about Columbia updating the agreement with the US over facilities use, some fear a Latin American domino affect of Chavez-like dictatorships (I'm assuming that's an allusion to the domino effect scare in Southeast Asia during the US involvement in the communist "threat" over there).
Okay, here's the question: will Chavez-like regimes spring up around Latin America, a region struggling in some areas through peaceful color revolutions and others through violent revolution/insurgency to achieve some kind of stable democracy and turnover of power in the presidency? And is that a bad thing?

As for Venezuela, I think that the socialism rising there isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've heard speakers talk about whole factories revolting and forming a classless system where anyone can be trained to do any job. And I suppose that's great, and alleviating the poverty gap and all that. But I think Venezuela has a real problem with the balance of its federalism. From what I understand, Chavez pretty tightly rules on the national level but tends to ignore the local grassroots revolutions that he's supposedly supporting. There's too much disconnect. I don't really understand how the nation is stable at all.

Brazil is more democratic, and it seems like the president is less willing to subscribe to extremist politics or to give into thinkers from either wing. And he's also narrowing the poverty gap without any messy socialist revolutions. I think that Latin America would be worsened by a Chavez domino effect, especially since it would really put tension on international relations between Latin America and the US.

Do I think it will happen? I don't know, I'm not an economist or a political scientist.

I don't really know what I'm talking about. Seriously. I just love that nobody can get too mad at me for spilling out vague ideas in a blog.

sad and happy...

Bad news first:
1. It seems God and all creation just doesn't want me to be a humanist and help others. Every effort I make to do a humanitarian program gets thwarted. I really, really wanted to take this class at my school that works on projects in developing countries and then goes to these countries for all of January to implement the projects. Unfortunately the class is always massively over-enrolled. This time they accepted about 40% of enrolled students, and I was not one of them. This is very frustrating to me because I can't seem to find the resources or connections to do the volunteer work that I want to do. Now I am left with just my peer mentoring program I'm doing, which is good yes, but not quite the same. At this rate, I'll get denied the funding to go work in India this summer that I'm fighting for. But I won't give up yet!

2. This is going to most likely annihilate any of my geographical anonymity, but it's just so freaking amazing that I have to brag. One of my classes is taught by Alan Guth!!!! If you are leading a sorry enough existence to not recognize that name immediately, I will tell you that he is the father of the modern inflationary theory that is currently held to best explain the phenomena manifested from the very early stages of the universe. (See wikipedia article.) I expected like Stephen Hawking, and he is somewhat like Stephen Hawking, but he can talk and walk and stuff (hopefully that doesn't sound offensive; it is true), and he's actually quite a good lecturer. Today wasn't that bad because it was a cosmology overview, and because I am an avid modern physics fan fiction reader, I was up to date. But as soon as we have to start doing calculations and (Zeus forbid) using differential equations, I'm doomed.

I also was thrown rudely into electromagnetism today during my computational neuroscience lab which I think I will drop as the teacher started scribbling differential equations describing different models for neurons in very small handwriting. I think the class would be really interesting, but I just don't want to put myself through it if I can take the much easier neurophysiology of memory class I am also signed up for. And, the one benefit of not getting into the development lab is that I only have to take five classes now instead of the original suicidal six.

Random other note- my philosophy of film teacher is legitimately deaf. He spent the first thirty minutes of his lecture last night trying to get his hearing aids to work. Without success.

Cracks (some fiction I wrote two years ago)

She always cleaned on Mondays, but never like this. The dust blew out in nebulas as things shifted in the closet. The furniture polish bit at her eyes, justifying the tears that cut gullies down her dirt-smeared cheeks. Her hands fluttered in the afternoon light. Once they were so strong, the wedding ring cutting angles on her straight fingers. Now they looked like weak things in need of rehabilitation.
She cleaned to blur her mind away from everything, but she found today that the distraction of smoothing wood picture frames and ironing dresses only gave her mind the permission it needed to dwell in the very places she was trying to escape.
Always it was the wedding that came first and last, Harvey in his jacket that pulled smooth over his muscular shoulders so that his shirt was as taught as his body. She saw the moment when he tried to pour champagne down her throat but missed, the pink fluid creating a pool on the chest of her wedding dress. He had apologized endlessly, even gotten down on his knees the way he had when he slid the angular ring on her strong finger, but of course she hadn’t cared, and now the most important thing about her wedding seemed to be that washed-out pink blush that still lingered on her dress.
The light caught on her weakened joints, the veins raised against the flesh. It seemed absurd that they were the same hands that he held that night. Time had divided things somehow, so that in all of the continuity some indiscernible fracture had occurred, and now there was no convincing connection but the gaunt memories billowed out by the sting of ammonia on tile.
She had felt so safe that wedding night. She had never expected it. She had anticipated claustrophobia, panic, the walls closing in with a dizzying tilt, but the moonlight on his bare back had actualized her, defined her again as something strong and new.
Now, her own back was a bit crooked from the shallow advent of years, and her skin, once silvered in the night, was mottled from the bombardment of ultraviolet light.
If she wiped the pictures three times, she thought, she could erase their contents, wipe the memories from her mind.
Every Monday he had brought Chinese food takeout. The greasy, white boxes and the crumbled fortune cookies in plastic wrappers became the symbolism of her happiness. They were closest when they spooned out the sweet and sour chicken. No matter the trials of the week in those early years, every Monday was a baptism that ameliorated all of the small fissures between them that every week were in need of healing.
The 409 dripped thickly down the glass, the solvent helpless against the buildup of grime.
She could not pinpoint exactly a first Monday on which there was no Chinese food, and the week’s pains were left to accumulate for the next week’s Monday, though such a day must have happened. She was aware of a gradual shift from fortune cookies predicting fantastic futures to fortune cookies dispensing advice, and finally to fortune cookies commanding her actions.
She tried to forget, but as she wiped at the hopelessly tarnished glass, she was transported again to that night when all of the symptoms she had repressed became unbearable in the silence and sterility between them.
It was odd, finding out she wasn’t the one the way they had always believed there was nothing else but each other. How could there be spaces he needed someone else to fill? How could someone else share his fortune, his future, his bed?
She had, until that night, naively believed that love never died, and she thought it would sustain her. But then the mortality of romance overwhelmed her, and she lay on the bed they had consummated together and sobbed until her nose bled onto the white sheets, and she left the blood to dry and decay.
She didn’t know where he was now as she cleaned what she planned on taking. She felt their separation deep inside of her below the place the pink champagne had spilt on her white dress so long ago. There were so many years between them, so many losses, so many hopes that dried up now as the sun descended.
The door was not audible enough to shake her from her washing of the pictures with her tears, tears which dissolved the dirt after the 409 failed. When she finally became aware of his presence, he was standing in front of her with pink champagne and Chinese food in greasy, white boxes. They said nothing as she cracked open a fortune cookie with trembling, aging fingers (“don’t lose faith in tomorrow”), and he tried to kiss her lips but missed. He looked so small, finally, in this end.
She would still leave in the morning with her pictures and her shame, but for now, it was Monday, and there were so many cracks to fill.

the math... it haunts me...

So it makes sense that there is some conceivable pattern for every finite list of numbers (things, etc) that could either be disproved or not disproved (never proved of course; nothing is ever proved in science, just not disproved) by the addition of another element. Sure, we may not be smart enough to come up with conceivable patterns for really long sets of elements, but it seems like as long as that set is finite, such a pattern must exist.

I don't know why this is interesting. It just is. I wish I could remember my topology. It's like the concept of a cover or something... anyway, as the world is mostly finite (leave infinity for math and physics groping for solutions), there should be a pattern to everything.

That's kind of comforting, even though of course most of those patterns are probably wrong. But who would ever know if the additional element is never given, if the pattern is never explicable?

2 things

1. It bothers me when people say I'm "converting oxygen to carbon dioxide." Oxygen is absorbed through the linings in the alveoli in the lungs into the capillary beds where it is distributed through pulmonary circulation. Once distributed, it serves as the final electron acceptor in the electron transport chain. The electron transport chain is a series of redox reactions that generates the proton gradient in the Krebs cycle that provides energy for the pump that drives the creation of ATP, cellular energy.
Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is, I think, a byproduct of the citric acid cycle, which is a separate event from the electron transport chain and the Krebs cycle. The citric acid cycle generates the electron carrier molecules needed for further redox reactions by transforming carbon-based molecules.
This carbon dioxide waste is carried in the blood back to the lungs where it is absorbed back through the alveoli down a concentration gradient and respired back into the atmosphere.
You are not "converting oxygen to carbon dioxide."

2. I think it's really interesting that we have a stronger memory for visual things than for other senses. I think it's true that olfactory stimuli provide the strongest memory inducer, but try this exercise: conjure the image of your bedroom, or office, or whatever room you're not at at the moment. It's pretty clear, right? Now conjure the taste of chocolate cake. I mean, I want you to really taste it the way you really see your room. It doesn't work as well, does it? I wonder why that is? Maybe the visual component of our engrams is stronger than the other components? I don't know enough to know that. Hopefully some day I'll find out.

That's all for now folks.