OK, so after reading yesterday's disaster of a journal entry, let me just say that I'm really not that neurotic and annoying in real life. I need to stop writing journal entries before I've eaten, I think it's bad for civilization in general.
I will say one thing though, thanks to good wishes from everyone. I talked to K. we're on for Friday, everything's cool.
On that note, today's entry will be very manly, all about football and steaks and girls with outrageously large breasts.
Or maybe not. I'm a guy, but I'm not that much of a guy. If you get my drift.
In solidarity with my good friend teclo, who had her first echocardiogram yesterday (which I'm sure revealed a perfectly functioning heart) I've posted a new picture, namely one of my own brain done from an MRI a while back. I actually have functional MRI data from that same scan, which I can also post if I ever get around to scanning it, though it probably wont make a whole lot of sense to anyone here, as I'm (almost) a neurobiologist and have a damned hard time interpreting it. It's not my fault, I was a volunteer in a friend's research study, and his experiment was very poorly designed. There is some activity in the dorsolateral medial prefrontal cortex, however, which is an area key to rewarding behavior. Wonder what I was thinking about at the time....
Actually though, with my own brain taking center stage in this entry, I can use the opportunity to talk a little bit about some of my own work. Basically, what I'm interested in is figuring out how a single protein can alter organization of molecules at a synapse, and what the functional repercussions on this reorganization are at the level of synaptic transmission (neurons talking with one another) and at the level of whole animal behavior. This is a daunting task, so I've chosen to study a particular synapse that has not received much attention at all in previous studies as my model system.
This is the inferior olive to deep cerebellar nuclear synapse. If you look at the picture, you can see the cerebellum clearly. The picture bisects my brain parasagitally, meaning imagine a blade coming down on top my head in such a way that it would cut straight through my face between the eyes. That's what you're looking at. The left side is the back of my head, the right side is the front. At the leftmost portion of the skull, if you move down and to the right a bit, you'll see a sort of circular object that is semi-separated from the rest of the brain. That's the cerebellum, it's what allows you to learn and modify motor and coordination activities, as well as some other things. In the center of that circle are the deep cerebellar nuclei. These are the neurons that send the output from the cerebellum back to the rest of the brain. The cerebellum functions as sort of high-level comparitor circuit, balancing input from higher centers (emotional, cognitive input) with sensory and autonomic input (visual, auditory, etc., as well as balance and things like heart rate, breathing rate, etc.) It's very useful to have, I must say.
To the right of the cerebellum is a sort of thin stalk, that's the brain stem. This controls basic activites like breathing, keeping your heart beating, etc. You need this. About halfway up the brainstem in the picture are the vestibular nuclei - these control your sense of balance. On the right side is a very small region called the inferior olive. This is the other half of the synapse. This region sends the sensory and autonomic input to the cerebellum, through projections referred to as "climbing fibers" because of how they look when stained with a particular dye. These projections synapse on to either a set of cells called "Purkinje Neurons" that are in the outer layer of the cerebellum, or to the Deep Cerebellar Nuclear neurons, and they are "Excitatory synapses," meaning when they fire, they make the next neuron in the chain much more likely to fire, by increasing the voltage inside that neuron.
I am, as far as I can tell, the first person to ever grow these two cell types outside the body in a dish and cause them to synapse with each other.
* takes a bow *
Which, in and of itself is really not that big of a deal. But it's a neat way for me to learn more about organization of the synapse and creation of new synapses, as well as try and determine the role of the particular protein that I'm studying called Neuregulin.
I promise, I will talk more about this (if people want to hear it) but this entry is already too long, and if I finish my story then absolutely no one will read the whole thing. And what would be the point of that?
In others news, it's snowing like crazy, which is pretty cool. And debrajean is really hot.
I will say one thing though, thanks to good wishes from everyone. I talked to K. we're on for Friday, everything's cool.
On that note, today's entry will be very manly, all about football and steaks and girls with outrageously large breasts.
Or maybe not. I'm a guy, but I'm not that much of a guy. If you get my drift.
In solidarity with my good friend teclo, who had her first echocardiogram yesterday (which I'm sure revealed a perfectly functioning heart) I've posted a new picture, namely one of my own brain done from an MRI a while back. I actually have functional MRI data from that same scan, which I can also post if I ever get around to scanning it, though it probably wont make a whole lot of sense to anyone here, as I'm (almost) a neurobiologist and have a damned hard time interpreting it. It's not my fault, I was a volunteer in a friend's research study, and his experiment was very poorly designed. There is some activity in the dorsolateral medial prefrontal cortex, however, which is an area key to rewarding behavior. Wonder what I was thinking about at the time....
Actually though, with my own brain taking center stage in this entry, I can use the opportunity to talk a little bit about some of my own work. Basically, what I'm interested in is figuring out how a single protein can alter organization of molecules at a synapse, and what the functional repercussions on this reorganization are at the level of synaptic transmission (neurons talking with one another) and at the level of whole animal behavior. This is a daunting task, so I've chosen to study a particular synapse that has not received much attention at all in previous studies as my model system.
This is the inferior olive to deep cerebellar nuclear synapse. If you look at the picture, you can see the cerebellum clearly. The picture bisects my brain parasagitally, meaning imagine a blade coming down on top my head in such a way that it would cut straight through my face between the eyes. That's what you're looking at. The left side is the back of my head, the right side is the front. At the leftmost portion of the skull, if you move down and to the right a bit, you'll see a sort of circular object that is semi-separated from the rest of the brain. That's the cerebellum, it's what allows you to learn and modify motor and coordination activities, as well as some other things. In the center of that circle are the deep cerebellar nuclei. These are the neurons that send the output from the cerebellum back to the rest of the brain. The cerebellum functions as sort of high-level comparitor circuit, balancing input from higher centers (emotional, cognitive input) with sensory and autonomic input (visual, auditory, etc., as well as balance and things like heart rate, breathing rate, etc.) It's very useful to have, I must say.
To the right of the cerebellum is a sort of thin stalk, that's the brain stem. This controls basic activites like breathing, keeping your heart beating, etc. You need this. About halfway up the brainstem in the picture are the vestibular nuclei - these control your sense of balance. On the right side is a very small region called the inferior olive. This is the other half of the synapse. This region sends the sensory and autonomic input to the cerebellum, through projections referred to as "climbing fibers" because of how they look when stained with a particular dye. These projections synapse on to either a set of cells called "Purkinje Neurons" that are in the outer layer of the cerebellum, or to the Deep Cerebellar Nuclear neurons, and they are "Excitatory synapses," meaning when they fire, they make the next neuron in the chain much more likely to fire, by increasing the voltage inside that neuron.
I am, as far as I can tell, the first person to ever grow these two cell types outside the body in a dish and cause them to synapse with each other.
* takes a bow *
Which, in and of itself is really not that big of a deal. But it's a neat way for me to learn more about organization of the synapse and creation of new synapses, as well as try and determine the role of the particular protein that I'm studying called Neuregulin.
I promise, I will talk more about this (if people want to hear it) but this entry is already too long, and if I finish my story then absolutely no one will read the whole thing. And what would be the point of that?
In others news, it's snowing like crazy, which is pretty cool. And debrajean is really hot.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
oh were are you going for dinner friday?