I’m teaching an upper-level course in neurobiology this term, and as I usually do, I made all the poor suffering students go out and create blogs, and I also told them they had to write one post a week about neuroscience. Today I was asked if I was going to pharyngulate their blogs, and of course I said I would. So go forth and harrass them! A word of warning, though: as many people learned last time I did this, these are not passive, cowed students, but feisty upperclassmen who are comfortable with biting back; the worst thing you can do is be condescending or patronizing.
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neurobiology wants to know if you’d like a younger brain. These kids…yeah, sure, gloat.
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Another blog titled Neurobiology discusses schizophrenia and GABA.
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MandieGirl writes about the Brainbow technique. I’m not going to get to that for a few more weeks! It’s beautiful stuff, though.
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thoughts of neuro writes about neuronal migration. This is a developmental neuroscience course, they’ll be hearing much more about that.
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Dkmecik needs to post something. I shall nag!
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Neuro-Tick has two posts up: a review of the paper we discussed in class last week, and something on the induction of demyelination, relevant to anyone interested in MS.
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Synapse is about rats…rats infected with parasites. Awesome.
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A Heathen’s Attempt at Reason tackles Notch and Delta, already getting in the spirit of molecular neurodevelopment.
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Noggin Bloggin’ discusses recent reports on the googlization of our brains.
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Bailey’s Blog also has two entries already: pain (why would a student think of that in the first week of classes?) and brains and the universe.
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Jenni talks about Parkinson’s Disease.
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Neurobiology Thoughts considers bilingualism and dementia. Learning a second language can save your brain!
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Ginger Synapse discusses optogenetics. Let’s control our brains with the light switch!
(Also on Sb)
No mind in the ether, hovering above the brain and working in mysterious ways?
Michael Egnor will be so disappointed.
Glen Davidson
Ginger Synapse is a really clever name.
All these kids, so full of vim and lime-a-way and fresh ideas! I remember being like that once, before the world beat me down and I became bitter, cynical and jaded. I think I was like, six or seven.
And here I am taking an ordinary Neuro class. I’m jealous.
So much better than my courses, but then again I am only taking junior level stuff. I wish my teacher promoted my bloggin’.
I see you’re training an army, PZ. Creationists, be warned.
Brownian; I have been beat down, but I think I am too stubborn to be jaded. Bitter? Yes. Totally. But never shall I be jaded.
Alright, so the first one I check out (Neurobiology, the second one on the list http://blog.lib.umn.edu/chunk002/myblog/2011/09/schizophrenia.html) I think is plagiarizing. I posted to her/his blog why I thought this was so, I’ll be happy to be told I’m wrong (and why).
I can do condescension and patronizing. I’ll even add pompous at no additional charge.
Yeowww. Do they teach spelling, grammar, and punctuation today? Some of those sites (e.g., “neuronal migration”) are embarrassing.
T. gondii Rats and Cats
That’s the microorganism I was thinking of. I got to thinking about it, and it occurred to me that T. gondii affects cats, and people, much as it does rats.
Read another post (forget where) in which the author tells of his experience with rats and a cat that refused to eat the rats. What did the rats do? they apparently adopted the cat as their mother, and would offer the cat food.
What do cats do with people?
Adopt us as their parents and offer us food.
Now with all the contact between people and cats how do humans end up behaving?
We adopt some sky daddy as a surrogate parent and offer him food. Which leads me to ask, what if religion is an expression of T. gondii infection in H. sapiens?