On Anger

I am now back in St. Louis working in my neurology/neuroscience lab. There is a lot of downtime when I waiting for western blots to get washed or brain lysates to get centrifuged so I have been doing a lot of thinking. Mostly about silly, abstract things. But if I didn't gleefully unload those ideas on my blog and inflict them on you loyal readers (I have quite a few by now), what purpose would this blog serve? Exactly.

So today's topic: what is the biological significance of anger? What is the neurochemical basis of it? In our neuroscience class we went on a whirlwind tour through various emotions and structures in the brain involved in mediating them, but this was more like window shopping. Despite the briefness of this tour, anger was never explicitly mentioned.

And that's weird. Anger is one of the most primal emotions/drives out there. It is rooted in human nature and ranks right alongside lust, hunger and hope. Yet it doesn't seem to serve any constructive purpose. Sure, cultures and creeds of all kind are replete with lores describing in detail the nature and consequences of wrath. Real history is full of examples of rage. But nothing useful has ever come out of this. In all these stories and real life examples, very bad things have resulted from anger.

Some song that I used to know

Lame pun alert! You probably figured out what this post is about just by reading the title. If not, well you should lay off whatever it is you are enamored with right now.

Anyway, I am not normally a fan of these sappy, lovey-dovey type songs with high vocals. The exaggerated agonizing gets to me. For whatever reason, though, Gotye's "Somebody that I used to know" has struck a chord with me (another lame pun!). Maybe it's his voice, maybe it's the slow beat in the background. Maybe it's the plaintive but resonant lyrics. The song has been stuck in my head and I listen to it (and the Glee cover version - which is good in its own right) an average of two times a day. Lately whenever I tune the radio to 102.7 I seem to catch the song there too.

Here's the official version from his vevo:

Year end

Last post was more than a month ago. Sort of understandable as I was pretty much held hostage by neuroscience (or, if you are Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, neural science). Could only wiggle out of its hold by learning a shit load of information and passing a test. That test also marked the end of my first year in med school.

[Take a moment and pretend I wrote up a bunch of cliches about how fast time flies, and how only yesterday was I blah blah]

Currently enjoying the remaining two days of my brief break before I report back to duty in my research lab in St. Louis for summer research. A friend messaged me couple days ago asking if I could do a brief retrospective on my first year (specifically for the non-med school readers) and posed a bunch of questions. That's as good an excuse as any to get me back to this blogging thing.

• What was the worst part of it? You know, this is a difficult question to answer because overall, I enjoyed the experience. There were moments that left me pretty exasperated and desperately in need of a walk (things like memorizing tracts or nuclei of nerves, for example), but in the grand scheme of things, it was nothing.

• What was the best part of it? Anatomy. A while back I wrote in glowing terms about anatomy. Good stuff.

• How did you keep sane? That's easy. Med school (first year, at least) didn't pose the threat of driving me to insanity. I found myself having loads of free time on my hands, and made good use of it. At various points in time, I picked up quirky hobbies. Read a lot. Wrote here and there. Made friends. 

• Was it as difficult as people say it is? The previous answer touched on this. Not difficult, just requires you to digest more information in shorter time than in undergrad. 

• The most surprising aspect? How much stuff there is to know before we can get even remotely competent to start seeing and treating real patients. I mean before going in I knew I have a long way to go, but I was still surprised by my own staggering ignorance.

• The thing people may not know about med school that you'd want to share? Med students are pretty normal people, just like you. They have the same desires, interests and quirks. They like to celebrate occasions, party and enjoy life just like any other breed of students. 

Saw these bumper stickers on one car while driving around town:

"Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed."

"I get enough exercise pushing my luck."

Hallucinating using ping-pong balls and static

I am tremendously fascinated with subjects like optical illusions and hallucinations - phenomena that distort reality and trick the brain into "thinking" or "imagining" things that aren't true or even there.

Yesterday I stumbled upon an article that described an interest experiment (first performed in the 1950's to test theories on ESP and other assorted mumbo jumbo) that leads to pseudo-hallucinatory experiences (why I use the term "pseudo" will become clear in a moment). Since I am not a prominent member of a rock band and generally like to follow the law, this was my one golden opportunity to engage in some groovy mind-altering activity in a G-rated manner.

The experiment (called "Ganzfeld", German for "entire field", if wikipedia is to be believed) is tantalizingly simple and requires hilariously low-tech equipment:

1. One ping-pong ball

2. A pair of headphones

3. Some device that produces static noise

4. A lamp

First, cut the ball in two and place the two halves on both eyes. Next, start the static noise (some helpful soul posted 11 hours worth of white noise on youtube here) and plug in your headphones. Turn your face towards the lamp, lie down and relax. Here's a cartoon dude (presumably dreaming about rainbows and a bearded man) demonstrating the procedure:

Now before I delve into my own experience, a word about the mechanism. Unlike (highly) illegal drugs like LSD, which work through receptors and whatnot, the ganzfeld experiment works by "fooling" the brain or compelling it to "fill in the gaps" by depriving it of proper stimuli. The ping-pong balls force your eyes to look at a uniform white field and the static saturates your ear with sound of one frequency. The brain freaks out and frantically starts churning out random halo-like images to compensate. In this sense, what the user witnesses are not real hallucinations (now that's an oxymoron, if there was one), but extreme visual distortions that we can call pseudo-hallucinations.

So I trotted out to Walgreen's, purchased some ping-pong balls (the employee there mistakenly thought I was interested in buying a beer-pong kit, which I assured her I wasn't) and came back home. I turned off my phone, cranked up the static and plugged in my super sweet Audiotechnica headphones. One ping-pong ball sacrificed for the noble cause, I was ready to go.

As my body started to adjust to the conditions, I began relaxing. Within 10 or so minutes, I began seeing weird shapes and started feeling a sensation of being rocked gently, as if on a boat. Pretty soon, I started seeing weird stuff: tissue samples from histology, rotating hands, people shaking hands, a woman descending a staircase, a dog running up to a man to lick his hands, a bunch of people surfing on waves....

I slipped into a dream-like state and saw Shawn and Gus from the TV show Psych. I also saw a bunch of people playing chess and, perhaps the strangest apparition of them all, the umbrella lady from the following painting:

I also saw myself on the roof of some tall building which was engulfed by massive sea waves in seconds. Each image sort of appeared in the middle of my visual field and dissolved. After about 20 minutes, I took off the balls and unplugged the headphone. I staggered to the sink to wash my face, still in a bit of daze.

Definitely a very illuminating experience.

April aardvarks

If you came here looking to read about aardvarks, sorry to disappoint you. I needed a gimmicky title. Just so you don't leave angry at me and at life, here's a picture of everyone's favorite aardvark Arthur, sporting one of my favorite outfits:

Moving on. Currently we are three weeks into the third and final block of first year. Neuroscience is the flavor of the month (or rather, the block).

First day of neuroanatomy lab, we were handed a bucket with a brain sloshing in formaldehyde, a rusty set of dissection tools, and a giant-ass steak knife. What a beautiful knife. I couldn't stop staring at it. So when the time came to chop the mushy brain into half, I wielded the beastly looking thing and went to work. The first thing I realized is the brain is disturbingly soft and food-like. Brain slices look like banana bread from a distance and one of my classmates even went as far as comparing it to a steak.

Having never taken neuroscience before, this is mostly uncharted territory for me. But I have found I get easily excited by G-protein coupled receptors, signaling cascades and ascending somatosensory tracts, so this has been a very fun journey. Nothing like a good view of lateral geniculate nucleus to brighten the day.

Enough about academics. In the past four weeks, I read five books - a pace I have not been able to match since my senior year of high school. To take up more space and give this blog post some more substance, here are capsule reviews of each:

Poem of the week - "Face to face" by Transtromer

I blogged about the genius that is Tomas Tronstromer once before. My classmate has lent me a collection of his poems and I have been gorging on some good TT. Here's one that caught my eye.

Face to face

In February living stood still.

The birds flew unwillingly and the soul

chafed against the landscape as a boat

chafes against the pier it lies moored to.

The trees stood with their backs turned towards me.

The deep snow was measured with dead straws.

The footprints grew old out on the crust.

Under a tarpaulin language pined.

One day something came to the window.

Work was dropped, I looked up.

The colors flared. Everything turned round.

The earth and I sprang towards each other.


So simple and beautiful. Love the line "Under a tarpaulin language pined".

Havings some fun with immunology

Immunology was easily the most interesting class this block. Granted the material wasn't all that new to me (I took it in undergrad), but there is something about the complexity, scale and harmony of the immune system that makes me a mellow romantic each time I encounter it. The immuno department at WashU is top-notch, stacked with all-star talent, and that played a role in making the class fun as well. Plus, the coursemaster very generously pitched in to host a giant superbowl party (see what I did there?) in the main lecture hall.

True to form, the immuno final exam (the last one in a long week), which was last Friday, offered us a golden opportunity to be creative and have some fun. The very last question on the test was: you are designing a video game marketed to pre-med and med students whose goal is to teach immunology and make it seem fun. Explain why immunology is so important to the curriculum and professional careers of med students. Give your game a name.

As soon as I saw this question, the creative juices started flowing as if a million myoepithelial cells were squeezing the juice out through the duct. Here are some snippets of what I wrote: