right brain update

long radio silence. been busy; been sick. 'cross season has been going well; that is, it *was* going well until i succumbed to ye olde swine flu. i've spent the last week mostly in bed. the worst part is the brain fog... even when i'm not on nyquil my brain is moving at about 1/25 normal speed.

i finished my NSF grant on time, fortunately before i got sick. i even turned it in a few days early. it feels very good to be done with that deadline... though the next deadline, the comprehensive exam, is imminent (contingent upon me recovering from this flu). i have a topic and i think i understand it pretty well, but i still need to pick which testable hypotheses i am going to propose experiments for. it's interesting, since there are so many unanswered questions in biology, it's like low-hanging fruit. which one of these will i test. and since it's a proposal exam, i don't have to have any intention of actually *doing * those experiments (in fact i shouldn't). so i can suggest expensive, or time-consuming, or radically new procedures, as long as i can defend why i picked them and what they would show. and so it goes.

a large part of what i wrote about in my nsf personal statement essay was how my... *ahem*... "unique" background has prepared me for studying and communicating science. i chose to draw (no pun intended?) from my background as a visual artist/designer - although not a very experienced or good one, since i tend to be way too self-critical to be good - to visualize and communicate science. and i've been doodling today with my new wacom bamboo. it's a really fun toy - opens up completely new frontiers. so far nothing i've produced has really been scientific at all, but i am having fun playing with my own perception of visual objects. the little picture at the top of this post is one of the things i've spat out - this one probably took 10 minutes tops. i'm not sure if she's princess leia, or if she's got huge ears, or even if she's human, but i kind of liked her and felt like i could maybe let the world see her too.

it's almost like the virus has shut down the left hemisphere of my brain. my right brain seems to be functioning just fine - or maybe even better than usual. without that annoying left brain timekeeper ruler metric voice i can just produce things that resonate with how i feel. hopefully later on this will translate to me being able to communicate the ideas i am nurturing that have to do with development and neural circuits.

i also expect there to be bicycles in the near future. a future without bicycles is grim indeed.

book mini-review: quantum neurobiology edition

On a recent (though not the most recent) trip to Portland, I had the chance to stop in to Powell's Books (indeed, what's the point of going to Portland if you can't go to Powell's?). Despite having had several drinks earlier in the evening (or perhaps because of it) I picked up two interesting-seeming books; when I got home from the trip, however, I lost interest or got busy and set them aside. I picked one of them up again soon, and in the intervening time, however, I've been able to finish the first and get about a quarter of the way into the second, and am going to spend some time tonight working my way through the second book. They're fairly similar, despite having been published a decade apart, and extremely timely, despite one being 17 years old.

The first is Information in the Brain: A Molecular Perspective by Ira B. Black. It's an enormous book, despite only being 225 pages (including references and index) - so it's going to take perhaps a whole re-reading to fully understand, but it's basically a great overview of neural signal transduction and how molecules store information. The most salient argument to me is his assertion that biology is behavior and behavior is biology - that there is no delineation between the metabolism of an organism and its behavioral output. The book was published in 1991, so many of the questions he has no answer for have been solved by now, but it's still a wonderfully compact (though dense) introduction to the way brains store and recall information, and an unprecedented synthesis of ideas that any student of developmental or molecular neurobiology should read.

The second is Jeffrey Satinover's The Quantum Brain, with a subtitle sufficiently new-agey to scare away most serious readers, I'm guessing: "The search for freedom and the next generation of man." Smells like woo, right? But so far, it's pretty interesting, and he definitely backs up his claims with good science. It's from a much more computational/AI/systems approach, as opposed to the cellular approach of Black... I'm not far along enough to make a judgement about the quality of the content, but I'm finding the AI/computational/theoretical approach informative, if a bit abstract. From the introduction, I'm guessing that he plans to have a thing or two to say about how these ideas relate to (and redefine) "God"... and the woo alarms will be ringing when this happens, but hopefully he'll save it for the conclusion and leave it at a philosophical discussion.

Anyway, I'll have more to say about both these books in the future, and hopefully will make some sort of insightful tie between the two that will be interesting and informative. On the other hand, I might decide that the Satinover book is just a bunch of hooey (this is the author of a book entitled Cracking the Bible Code - seriously?)... we'll see. I can say that so far, neither of the authors have addressed the problem of how brains form in the first place; I have my own opinions about trying to understand the brain without first understanding its development, though many disagree with me.

(The only thing better than reading for pleasure: Reading for work (ok, indirect work) and pleasure simultaneously! I love it!)