Why study neuroscience? Because the human brain is the most complex invention evolution has come up with; we as humans have this amazing capacity to learn, be, think and create. Explore your mind. Learn about it! This is why my major is Psychology (actually, Psychology and Spanish with a Soc minor). I hope that by reading the material on my Web Page that you, too, will catch some of the excitement of studying the human brain.
The most exciting thing in my life right now is that I just got back from a semester spent studying abroad in Valladolid, Spain (that's about two hours northwest of Madrid). Que guay! One afternoon when I wasn't downing cachis of calimocho, holding a conguitos contest or discussing Latin lovers on the radio, I picked up a copy of Fundamentos de psiconeurobiologia (Fundamentals of Psychoneurobiology) by Pedro Gomez Bosque and Jose Antonio Gil Verona, both professors at the Universidad de Valladolid (where I studied, yay!). It's got Spanish translations of words I'm unfamiliar with in English, so mostly I just look at the funky pictures and diagrams. The cover has a photograph of a phrenology head made in Sevilla, with the cranial sections mapped off and labeled in Spanish. Kind of cool.
I love that included in our reading for Behavioral Neuroscience is a book titled Clinical Neuroanatomy Made Ridiculously Simple. Yes! After my friend Jason skimmed through the book, he asked if I'd ever heard of a brain organ called the Willis. No, I hadn't ever heard of the Willis, so this compels me to read the book to find out if this is a learning trick or if there really is a neural organ so named.
I'd like to mention thatthe Human Brain Coloring Workbook is defintely a cool resource for neuroscience students. In class Eric mentioned the title of a different neuroscience coloring book; I've seen them both for sale at the Hungry Mind. Bring out your colored pencils and hop on the neuroscience coloring bus. It's great.
This is interesting: the process of myelination isn't quite finished yet at birth, and some functions don't develop until certain nerves are myelinated. For example, sight does not develop until the optic nerve is myelinated, so babies cannot see when they are first born (however, this process of myelination doesn't take long).
One more thing about myelination is a phenomenon known as demyelination, in which sections of myelin degenerate. The disease multiple sclerosis is caused by demyelination of axons in the muscle cells; the result is that these nerve fibers no longer work.
The information I talked about here comes from a cool book called The Human Brain: Its Capacities and Functions by Isaac Asimov. I got my copy for forty-five cents at a place called the Yard Sale. I'm not sure if the book is out of print (it was published in 1965 by Times Mirror/Houghton Mifflin), but you can go look for it at a used bookstore. This book is all about simplicity, which is crucial to learning in neuroscience. Notions of equilibrium potentials, rough endoplasmic reticulum and bouton en passant can all get mushed up sometimes; books like this can help clear things up.
That's all for now. I'm outta here; see you next week. Pitufa.