Get Your Thinking Caps Here

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/06/euroupdate_2_is_science_art.php

HMMMmmmmmmm!

science is art as art is science?

Versus

old dogs versus new tricks

... does it really matter?

"Mental Gymnastics" regardless of their efficacy is better than having old fatties melting into the couch with a Heine in your fist and Van de Kamps smeared across your face watching last week's Lost on TiVo via projector on a white washed wall in your Fruit of the Looms.

Brains need food too, let's keep it local, organic, kosher -- or the intellectual equivalent.

Maybe it's the hippie in me but I'd rather invest in the high/false hope of warding off dementia with a gentle push-pull on my neurons than to cross my fingers passively and succumb to the mind-numbing wrath of the almighty popular culture of burning brain cells under the black light of social networking.

Red Pill Blue Pill

Driving back from my Tuesday lunchtime 5th grade screenwriting mentoring I tuned into NPR just in time to catch the tail end of this. And that led me to this slightly disturbing discovery.

If we are preset for our, hmm, let's call it "conscious awareness," what kind of reality is it if, should we be depressive by nature, we require chemical "enhancement," say, via psilocybin, to achieve charity? I find it unsettling from a philosophical perspective and yet intriguing from a neuroscience one.

Is that real or is this real? What is real?
vs.
Could this be a medical breakthrough or is the use of hallucinogens as a medical treatment completely delusional and backwards?

After fighting the good fight against drugs -- how cocaine is stored in your cells setting you up for overdose, acid is stored in your spinal cord, heroine can kill if you quit it and can drive you to an unintended suicide, ecstasy literally boils your insides and dissolves your brain -- studies like these come out and I feel like someone's just told me that north is east and west is south.

It's shaking the foundations of my moral debate with drugs, especially hallucinogens. Am I so naive and prudish to think any altering of the brain's chemistry should be scrutinized? Being a depressive individual myself who has turned down both psychotherapy as well as drug compensation, I wonder what lies out there in the world of behavioral assistance. No I'm not about to go chomp down on some 'shrooms, I still think what ails me has less to do with chemistry and more to do with irritating people and circumstance, but I wonder... am I being too strict in my adherence to bodily preservation? Or are these studies leading us down a psychedelic yellow brick road into fantasyland?

Dr. Clark Martin, the featured retired clinical psychologist, describes his experience as thus, "“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating. Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.” I've experienced similar sensations during guided meditation in my zen class. Why do I need psilocybin to point me in the right metaphysical direction?

I know highly intelligent people who dabble in drugs, and arguably dependent upon them to "cope" as they say, and some of them are still fantastic, highly functional human beings.... whereas others are incredibly lazy, dull, and intolerable. Does their drug use have any merit? Granted, it'll be harder for the lazy, dull, intolerable lot to convince me, but what of my pot head PhDs out curing cancer? What about them?

I wonder, what about those mathematicians I saw on that KCET/BBC special Dangerous Knowledge about mathematicians who were driven insane and ultimately to suicide on their quest to discover infinity? Would psilocybin have helped them find similar alleged "clarity" or is that clarity too an illusion?

It's the matrix all over again only instead of Keanu Reeves it's a little toxic fungus leading us down the rabbit hole.

I am hesitant to extend credit to the drugs themselves and more to the perspective adjustment itself, likely on the come-down. How is it different than community service, or the birth of a child, or a near death experience, or the endorphin rush from exercise, the soothing nature of controlled breathing like in yoga? Why the drugs?

Take my issue with medical marijuana for example... what's the point in smoking it? How are the deleterious effects of smoke inhalation worth the benefits of its medical use? Cannot migraines and nausea be satisfied with the body high of ingested tetrahydrocannabinol? Cannot muscles be relaxed with the same digestive base? Why smoke it? What's the head high for? Some argue that smoking, which constricts blood flow, helps relieve migraines, caused by dilation and expansion of blood vessels, but smoking compromises the integrity of those very same blood vessels leading to all sorts of problems more detrimental than the insufferable migraine itself. Pros and cons people! You're flirting with permanent damage for temporary relief. How does that make any sense?

--
Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again - NYT - John Tierney - Apr 11, 2010
Turns out all of that "mind expansion" you did in college might pay off in emotional stability - NPR - Patt Morrison - Apr 13, 2010

8 4 90 52 103

just spent 8 straight hours doing nothing but medicine today. shadowed a family practice doctor. took 4 hrs in the car to make it happen but i made it happen, even got to see the sunrise.

saw a vibrant and full of life 90 year old grandmother of 52, yes, FIFTY TWO grandchildren and i'm happy to say she wasn't the oldest cognizant person I've met. when i was working the ER over in SM I met a 103 yr old who was a feisty as the day she was born.

i feel so honored and lucky to be a part of this world, to be a witness to such life affirmation day after day. i cant wait to jump in.... hear that Creighton....? any day now right?... riiiigghhhttt?

i'm still here, and i'm still dreaming.

dont forget about me, universe.

Brain Food

At last! I spoke with Dr. N, one of the admissions directors, about my application and he had very favorable things to say. Said there was hardly a place left for improvement and that they thought my candidacy was a really good one, which made all my words fall out of smiling teeth from hence forth... just one... small... detail... "a weakness if you can even call it that," he said, was approximately 1/3rd of my MCAT score. Judging from his tone he did not think too much of it himself and said that likely my waitlist status was hung on that one stupid number, in the physics section no less, and likely just because it's so late in the process (interviewed late Feb). And half of that section is chemistry which I now tutor! Humph! But!! He said do what everyone should be doing and prep for the next cycle but to sit tight and wait till mid-June to see if I make it into the first round of accepted waitlisters. I have really good feelings about this, as do many of my closest friends, so I'm just going to keep the faith and hope and pray... and eat and love (I really gotta read that book...).

That said, I do not do waiting well. Not in the least. SO. Here's the tentative schedule for my brain food until med school:

full time to part time
VFC has a UCLA peds MD on standby for shadowing
UCLA brain doc's working out an epilepsy research/shadowing plan
driving down to SD on Mon to shadow a surgeon/primary care doc
CoachArt orientation on the 13th, art mentoring for terminally ill children
and finish up with YSF <3

now I just have to wait for the stars to align...

Oh no, you did *not* just tell me to wait(listed)

Dear Creighton,

I love you, you are my other half. Complete me and make my dreams come true.

Your one and only,

Laura

Homo-interneticus

are you a Homo-interneticus?

is the internet distorting our perception of reality? our social standards? our moral compass?

if you haven't already, listen to some of these BBC World Service broadcasts, they bring up a plethora of hard hitting questions about the way we do things here in the 21st century...

perhaps we should get off the internet and find out what we're missing.

no more talking, make it count

i have six weeks to perform two miracles

neither of them i have complete control over

and both are the world to me.

--

i have six weeks

and i have hope.

--

no more talking, make it count.

The Geography of Passion

I am devouring The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and my brain is brimming with philosophy!! Oh the masterpieces of literature, how thee feedeth my soul!

And here, a personal discovery:The geography of passion is a fiery one. It quakes and trembles from love to hate to love in a whirlwind of desire that makes for a livable, invigorating torture. Both malignant and benign, feeding fury while breathing life in heated, heavy exhales. It is inescapable, undeniable and all at once demise and creation. It's a concussion for the deep of you, that tender, vulnerable, emotional, horribly personal part of you that makes you you and not any other wayward sailor. It puts wind in your sails, pushing you into infinity, charged and moving, alive but stormy. It consumes you in the most vicious of ways: delicate but always threatening to crush you. And still, in all the turmoil, we embrace the flames and take the poison because to be without is just not to be at all.

In volunteering, in art, and now in medicine, all the pieces of me fall apart, away, dissolve and are immediately replaced with similar but different parts and this is my personal evolution.

Perhaps that is all life is: a balancing and great digestion of ambiguity and paradox. All that which makes us frustratingly uncertain is entirely the glue of the universe and nature. Is it not complete chaos at the center, at the most microscopic? There is peace in that madness, I cannot know for certain but that I do trust. This may be what all those zen masters are searching for, that peace in the chaos...

In my own life, I suspect many think I am a massive hypocrite or completely delusional the way I tend to do the exact opposite of what I say. Perhaps you think it immature or reckless, and in the context of your world you'd be entirely accurate. You are strict with your philosophy and mind set, which is itself admirable and fascinating, enviable even. My world, my constructed theories and perception, is fluid, always in flux. Here, everything is complex, but not necessarily complicated. In fact, much of it is simple, just, simply chaotic. There is so much to consider, and so much uniquely co-dependent, conjoined. Here you can commit only to the fact that what you're committing to is itself transient and impermanent, at least in how you know it at that precise moment in time, whatever that is. You adjust and accommodate constantly here. It is the code of life, it is the design of nature itself. When a natural disaster strikes and wipes away man's creations, does the earth beneath it die in sympathy? No, no it does not. It persists! It survives! Always. Earth explodes and the pieces become something new in the great open space. Everything is always changing, always fighting for life and more of it. Now is always slowly slinking into the past and the future is becoming the now and so forth.

Always everything is at once rising and in ruin.

We merely juggle the pieces as best as we can, being the messy, fumbling humans that we are.

And oh how we do it so beautifully.