We are about to finish Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer in class this week and I’ve been reflecting on how, despite science’s deep impact on how we think and act, we still have subconscious belief in superficial myths that slip out despite our common knowledge of biology and the world around us. For instance, Zimmer illustrates the battle that people like Thomas Willis went through in trying to draw attention to the superiority of the brain over the heart in its control over all our emotional and reasoning faculties. After dissecting thousands of brains, comparing and contrasting the anatomies of animals and humans, anatomies of past (Galen) and Willis’s present (Harvey), and pushing these ideas at just the right time over two decades and through two revolutions, Willis was finally able to solidify the brains mastery over the human body and personality rather than the heart.

Yet despite this great fight to make the brain’s superiority over the other organs common knowledge, we throw it all to the wind with sayings like “she broke my heart,” or, “he has a wicked heart.” Why have these sayings survived, and why do we still feel that emotions and our persons are derived from the heart? Can I say something like, “when she left it was like getting shot through the amagdyla,” or, “I’m so excited dopamine might spill out of my ears,” and not sound completely awkward?

Despite common knowledge about such happenings in the brain, we still communicate better with the myths of the past, such as the belief that the heart is the center for production of emotion and regulation of our actions and thoughts. I guess it really depends on how much we cling to these myths, and how far these myths go in messing true science. Most people know that emotional processes and personality are regulated by the brain, however, it is still easier to communicate our feelings and thoughts (which is essential to any culture) through common myths. Perhaps we’ll all use “scientifically correct” phrasing someday, but what has to happen to completely turn a culture to the truth?

Last night, I attended talks by Katha Pollitt and Julia Sweeney here at the Freedom from Religion Convention, and I learned that the godless are a happy, humorous, good-natured group — even if I weren’t philosophically inclined this way myself, I’d want to be a member of this community.

Then this morning, I checked in on my DonorsChoose challenge and discover that you’re all generous and charitable, and that you care about kids and education. I’m having a grinch moment right here…my heart is growing a few sizes larger, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a symptom of congestive heart failure. We met my initial challenge to raise $10,000, and then some.

So then, because this particular atheist is a cruel taskmaster, I simply bumped up the challenge amount to $20,000, and added a bunch of new grant requests, including some that asked for tools to do developmental biology in the lab, and some on fossils. So if you haven’t yet kicked in, you’ve still got an opportunity.

If that isn’t enough for you, or if you’d rather not have your donations going to a group labeled “freethinkers”, check out the Scienceblogs leaderboard — there are lots of unfunded proposals in those other guys spaces. I told them they should have tapped into the charitable goodness of the godless if they really wanted to draw in donations.

Oh, and many thanks to Phil for drawing in the astronomy crowd. Even people who stare into the cold, unfeeling void for fun are glad to help a good cause.

And thanks to all of you!

While I was reading the assigned chapters of the book Soul Made Flesh (Zimmer, 2004) for class this past week, I came upon the story of the physician Thomas Sydenham. He was particularly good at making careful bedside observations while he was treating patients. In fact, he made the observation that diseases acted the same in everyone, and they were not unique to an individual. He made careful notes on disease symptoms, and even suggested that perhaps diseases should be treated as if they are individual species.

Sydenham’s work turned out to be controversial, because when prescribing a treatment, sometimes he would not use the traditional one, but instead would experiment with different treatments. Other physicians wanted to get his license revoked because his experimentation outraged them, even though Sydenham documented which treatments seemed to work better. We discussed this a bit in class, but I want to know why his new treatments were so controversial. If he devised his treatments in a manner that seemed logical, and he had experimental evidence to back it up, why was there such resistance? Is it perhaps that people could not accept that traditional treatments really did not work, and that they may now be responsible for the deaths of many people that could have been saved? Or is it simply a matter of people not being able to accept that things change?

I must be the last one to hop on this bandwagon — only because I had to give everyone else a chance first, you know, I wouldn’t want to drain all the donors^* — but now it’s about time I joined in. Scienceblogs is working to raise money for teachers, and we need you all to chip in and donate to DonorsChoose. Go ahead and donate to any of the projects on the Scienceblogs leaderboard, or you can donate to the
specific projects in the Pharyngula challenge. It’s all a good deal, because Seed will match funds, up to $15000.

So come on, dig into your pockets, and hand over a little cash to the deserving cause of science education.

^*Actual reason: because I suck. But you all knew that.

My students are getting their first take-home exam in neurobiology tomorrow, and I’m using this entry to give them a convenient link to a paper they’re expected to analyze. The rest of you people can just ignore this.

1. We’ve discussed the ionic basis of the action potential and had an overview of channel properties. I’d like you to read the following paper from a recent issue of Nature, which neatly combines several subjects we’ve discussed:

Binshtok AM, Bean BP, Woolf CJ (2007) Inhibition of nociceptors by TRPV1-mediated entry of impermeant sodium channel blockers. Nature 449, 607-610.

There is also a News and Views summary in the same issue, A local route to pain relief, that will give you a digested version of the article.

It’s a clever experiment to generate a very specific analgesia. I want you to do two things in an essay:

1. Half the essay should be a short description of the TRPV1 ion channel: specificity, permeability, gating, pharmacology, and structure. You’ll need to do some research beyond this one paper to answer the question adequately.

2. The rest should be a critical analysis of the voltage-clamp method used in the Binshtok et al. paper. Don’t try to explain every result in the paper: focus on a key result and show me that you understand how to interpret the experiment and can explain the meaning of the data.

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Oh, also! Let’s plan on meeting in the Turtle Mountain Cafe tomorrow morning instead of the classroom, again — I’ll need my coffee while we discuss chapters 10 and 11 of Soul Made Flesh.

Jonah unkindly mentions that California will spend three times as much operating its prisons than running the UC system. Doesn’t that reassure you so much about America’s priorities?

Hello again! It’s been a little while since my last post and I need to post for this week or I’ll be docked points from Dr. Myers. I’ve been a little bit behind on things as I’ve been preparing for my upcoming senior seminar, but I did have time to check out at least one cool article I found on different energy systems used while running.

I had a race today and I noticed that every time I do an 8k (5 miles), about three miles in I hit a wall of fatigue. I get dizzy, it’s hard to focus on the guy in front of me, driving my knee up feels next to impossible, and the only thing I care about is eventually getting to the finish line. I know that much of this is probably because I’ve depleted a good portion of my glycogen stores and have worn out my muscles fairly well. But how does this tie in with my nervous system?

According to the article, a good portion of my glycogen stores are found in my liver. If too much of the glycogen is used hypoglycaemia can occur resulting in brain damage. Other bodily harm such as myocardial ischaemia, heat stroke, and severe ATP depletion from my muscles can occur too if my body is allowed to be pushed far enough.

Luckily for me, my muscles have a built in negative feedback to stop me from killing myself out there. My muscles somehow know to send a signal up to the brain for a release of serotonin and inhibition of dopamine secretion, which results in a further lack of ability to move, which results in a slower time, which puts Morris on the backburner in terms of our men’s cross country team. I’m still wondering though, how do my muscles know when to signal my brain to cut back on the neurotransmitters? And how much does mentality (a positive attitude towards the race, or the expectation of a good run) play a role in the regulation of my muscles (do I release more ACh and endorphins by simply having a good attitude, or is the causality the other way around?)? Either way, if you haven’t moved in a while, get out and enjoy this great October weather while it lasts. Or you can check out this pretty funny link of a band I found on youtube.