Login
Forgot Password?

OR

Login with Google Login with Twitter Login with Facebook
  • Join
  • Profiles
  • Groups
  • SuicideGirls
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Shop
Vital Stats

legionnaire

New Hope, PA

Member Since 2003

Followers 71 Following 44

  • Everything
  • Photos
  • Video
  • Blogs
  • Groups
  • From Others

Tuesday Jan 27, 2004

Jan 27, 2004
0
  • Facebook
  • Tweet
  • Email
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.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
vyeseleph:
mmm....olives.
Jan 27, 2004
cyber_faust:
very interesting to read about you're work. but i have a question: being the first person to get those cells to function like that in vitro (geez i hope i used that tern right) seems like something important, certainly something to publish or use for funding etc.

oh were are you going for dinner friday?

Jan 28, 2004

More Blogs

  • 02.12.10
    18

    Friday Feb 12, 2010

    Wow, it's been a long time since I've been on here. Someone actual…
  • 08.27.08
    11

    Wednesday Aug 27, 2008

    Well, I've moved once again, and am finally settled down, more or les…
  • 07.06.08
    6

    Sunday Jul 06, 2008

    Well, now I live in England. Funny how something like that can happe…
  • 05.31.08
    10

    Saturday May 31, 2008

    So, much to my surprise, I discovered yesterday that my account is ap…
  • 11.25.07
    3

    Sunday Nov 25, 2007

    So I cancelled the rebilling on my account, as many of probably have …
  • 10.05.07
    7

    Friday Oct 05, 2007

    I've been on SG for four years. I've got to say, I'm not sure that I…
  • 09.06.07
    9

    Thursday Sep 06, 2007

    Well, I'm now officially in my 30s. It doesn't feel so bad I suppose…
  • 08.17.07
    12

    Friday Aug 17, 2007

    Sometimes foresight is 20/20. He should have taken his own advice:…
  • 07.21.07
    8

    Saturday Jul 21, 2007

    What the hell has happened to New York City? It's like I went into h…
  • 06.08.07
    10

    Friday Jun 08, 2007

    Read More

We at SuicideGirls have been celebrating alternative pin-up girls for:

23
years
8
months
7
days
  • 5,509,826 fans
  • 41,393 fans
  • 10,327,617 followers
  • 4,589 SuicideGirls
  • 1,128,123 followers
  • 14,901,364 photos
  • 321,315 followers
  • 61,341,349 comments
  • Join
  • Profiles
  • Groups
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Shop
  • Help
  • About
  • Press
  • LIVE

Legal/Tos | DMCA | Privacy Policy | 18 U.S.C. 2257 Record-Keeping Requirements Compliance Statement | Contact Us | Vendo Payment Support
©SuicideGirls 2001-2025

Press enter to search
Fast Hi-res

Click here to join & see it all...

Crop your photo