Dolphins are my favorite animals, partly because of their extra-cute appearances: “friendly smile”, little flippers, and sleek and shiny body. But their intelligence is what amazes me the most. I once watched a video about dolphin training. I remember in one of the training sessions, the trainer asks the dolphin to go grab a ball from a basket, yet there is no ball in that basket. So the dolphin takes back the empty basket with him to show the trainer and presses the “No” button available. In another session, the trainer gestures two dolphins to perform two simple tricks then gestures them to perform the two tricks in one action. The dolphins immediately perform a combination of the two tricks without the trainer teaching them how.

 Kathryn Gould

Professor Grobstein

Neurobiology

14 May 2010

Tackling Trauma

Liz Frontino

The Blood-Brain Barrier: An Obstacle for Treatment

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Ballet is all about illusions. Dancers trick themselves and their audiences in order to produce a time-honored art form based on unnatural and highly ordered movements and positions. Much of what the audience sees is a trick or a distraction, because what they think they are seeing is impossible. Really, much of what dancers expect of themselves is impossible, because what they expect is perfection. In this quest for perfection, there is pain and often injury, but to a dancer, that is simply part of the cost of creating their art. Dance creates a very different perception of self than another sport or art form, perhaps because it is a combination of both.

                Whenever I think of wisdom I see an old man sitting on a bench ready to talk and give advice about life. But I’ve also heard the saying wise beyond their years, where with some children or young adult when you look into their eyes you see the old man or a wise being. Where does wisdom come from? How do people become wise? One method is by Erik Erikson’s eight steps. Erikson’s steps begin when you are first born and with age come certain experiences and problems that a person can overcome and obtain a certain value. If the experience is exaggerated the value can be lost or become a more extreme version of the value. Through these experiences a person in the end develops wisdom.

Eric Kandel shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine in 2000 “for [his] discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system” (The Nobel Prize). Nobel laureates are asked to write a short piece describing the research for which they were awarded the prize. What Kandel wrote instead was a nearly 500-page history of neuroscience and his own participation in it, as well a detailed description of his research on the cellular and molecular basis of memory. He ties his own life experiences, especially the necessity of leaving Vienna as a child in the face of the Nazi takeover, into his research, giving the book a more human element that makes it readable by the general public. Memory is Kandel’s life work.

The Butterflies of Our Mind

I was first introduced to “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” when I was searching information about consciousness disorders. The book was written by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a patient with locked-in syndrome. Then the chief editor of French Elle, Bauby suffered the condition caused by a massive stroke. Only able to turn his head and blink his left eye, he was “imprisoned inside his own body” (4). To me, it sounds like the worst nightmare one can possibly experience – even worse than a complete loss of consciousness. I cannot imagine how claustrophobic it would feel, unable to give response to the outer world when I could still feel everything around me.