decoding

It's a new year, which means this blog is up and running once again. For those of you coming across this page for the first time, the same caveat as before holds true: this page is strange. Blogspot is meant to be a study aid, and the stuff that's on this page is Finnegan's Wake-esque as a result--random thoughts from sports, top 40 music, cheap DVDs, news headlines, and the like, jumbled together with the stuff I'm learning in school and on my own in preparation for the USMLE Step 1 examination coming up in June (i.e. the first of many official tests I need to pass to become a doctor). As well, please forgive any spelling/grammar/syntax mistakes. You know I'm normally anal about such things, but unlike my premeditated Xanga, this is all pure brainfart. So, without further ado...

NYTimes.com today posted a headline about a newly identified gene that confers risk unto individuals for developing type 2 diabetes (i.e. insulin-resistant diabetes). The finding is significant for several reasons, the foremost being that this gene appears to be found in more than a third of all people. Diabetes is a complex trait, meaning that a broad variety of genes and environmental influences work in concert to generate the diabetes illness in an individual. But the identification of a gene with a particularly strong association with diabetes is significant because type 2 diabetes can be well controlled with diet, exercise, and other lifestyle modifications. Moreover, discovery of this gene can not only spur the development of a useful diagnostic test for diabetes, but also a gene-directed therapy for diabetes. And, personally, the best part about this study is that the authors are one of the chief collaborative groups with my current embattled mentor. Why he wasn't a co-author of the study I don't know, however.

the reader's muscle

from ben marcus' feature article in the october 2005 issue of harper's:

In the left temporal lobe of the brain, below the central sulcus of Ronaldo, but above and tucked behind both Broca's area and Heschl's gyri, sits Wernicke's area, a tufted bundle of flesh responsible for language comprehension... Think of Wernicke's area as the reader's muscle, without which all written language is an impossible tangle of codes, a scribbled bit of abstract art that can't be deciphered. Here is where what we read is turned into meaning, intangible strings of language animated into legitimate shapes. If we do not read, or do so only rarely, the reader's muscle is slack and out of practice, and the stranger, harder texts, the lyrically unique ones that work outside the realm of familiarity, just scatter into random words. The words may be familiar, but they fail to work together as architectural elements of a larger world.

queen amygdala

on tuesday night's season premiere of House M.D., a young girl showed extraordinary courage in facing her impossibly dire situation. naturally, dr. house dismissed her bravery as unremarkable, going so far as to posit that the girl was not showing genuine, organic courage but rather that her courage was merely a "fake" emotion conjured by her damaged brain.

it was my first time watching a full episode of house. at first i was skeptical, but by the end i was hooked. and what made it all the more riveting was my freshly garnered understanding of brain anatomy. the amygdala is the so-called "fear center" of the brain. a clot in that region of the girl's brain, so the logic went, could have canceled her fear response, thereby explaining her intrepidness. but omar epps spotted the clot in her hippocampus, and so house was wrong, which he in the end grudgingly admitted.

however, according to the notes for a class i had today, projections from the hippocampus to the amygdala provide sensory information about the context of fearful stimuli, a sort of background picture as the brain tries to size up a scary situation. a lesion in this pathway should somehow erase certain components of fear, although which i do not know yet.

you can't spell sclerotic without erotic

ever wondered what the sclerosis in multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis--aka lou gehrig's disease--stands for? well, i always have, and i've also always wondered why it's not multiple scleroses. after all, it's not called the march of dimis, right? har

anyway, here is my newfound understanding of sclerosis. the term is not derived from any neuroanatomy per se but rather from the word sclera, also known as the white of your eye. if you've ever poked at your eye with your finger as i do every morning to put in my contacts, you know that your eyeball is firm and springy, as if it were covered in taut rubber. in sclerotic diseases, the body responds with a process called reactive astrocytosis. this is, in essence, scar formation in the nervous system, analogous to the shiny, tough scars that form on your skin after a cut heals. like superficial scars, these nervous glial scars were found on autopsy to be much firmer than average nervous tissue, and thus the name sclerosis was born. in multiple sclerosis, for example, the immune system goes haywire and starts attacking the body's own nerve cells, resulting in sclerotic lesions that eventually clog up the nervous system. the image i always think of is wolverine plunging the syringe full of liquid adamantium into lady deathstrike, thereby filling her circulatory system with metal. beautiful, i know.

negligent

i haven't been posting because i don't have internet access at home.

exam is on monday, pray for me please.