I promise there's a reason I haven't been posting to this blog as of late, and it isn't at all related to an excuse about my cat eating my blog drafts.
First, on the high school lab demonstration front, I've been stalled waiting for the chemicals to do the electrophoresis portion of the lab. We recently received the enzymes we needed from New England Biolabs, but haven't received the buffer chemicals to do any sort of qualitative analysis of the effects of the enzymes on our DNA samples. So, there hasn't been any work to be posted.
Second, on the front of neuroscience, I've recently decided that I am going to need a whole slurry of advanced math knowledge that I currently don't posses. As I have said before, my college math exposure is severely limited, and I've been acquiring the skills necessary to do advanced calculus and work with differential equations. To that end, I've been running through the Khan Academy programs on calculus and differential equations, as well as several resources I've found on the web, including the MIT OpenCourseware 18.01,18.02 and 18.03 video lectures. The "Paul's Math Notes" resource has also proved invaluable, available at http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/. Note that anything I state incorrectly about math in the future should in no way reflect the quality of material at any of these sites, only my inability to absorb the information in the small amount of time I have allotted myself.
Also, I've been doing research on the structure of the neocortex in mammals, and our understanding of the processes their in. I've especially been focusing on the enzyme cascades involved in g linked protein receptors, as so far I've seen no evidence that these massive enzyme reactions are taken into account in the mathematical models of the brain I've seen so far (though I've only been looking at single neuron models, though most higher level models seem to be simplifications of the single cell models).
Over all, it seems that there is a lack of communication across the intra-discipline facets of neuroscience. The biologists aren't talking the physiologists, and everybody has their own mathematician, while the information theory guys sit in a corner and play with idealized circuits that no more approximate actual neurons than a light switch approximates a modern cpu. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me like a good deal of the knowledge needed to understand the brain exists, but has never been combined (with the synthesis of new relations and destruction of dead end supposition that that would imply).
I find myself wondering why this hasn't happened, and almost am unable to believe that it isn't some gross oversight of recent research on my part. But if it isn't an oversight on my part, I wonder why this coming together of the various researchers in a self proclaimed inter-discipline science has never seemed to happen.
For example, I have an affinity for the serotonin g linked protein receptor cascades. I think that the interaction of the raphe nucleus (the main serotonin producer in the brain), which connects to almost every other part of the brain, including the neocortex, could be a very interesting site to study the down stream effects of these enzyme cascades on overall neuron firing. Yet nobody seems to have talked about it except in reference to sleep cycles.
The same goes for every other thought I have about the brain as a whole. Everybody seems to be doing studies of these small problems, creating points of understanding, but nobody seems to be drawing the thick connecting lines that are going to outline the actual functioning of the brain as a whole. Perhaps this is a sophomoric line of reasoning, and maybe it is that they want to be certain of their conclusions before they integrate that understanding into the larger image of the brain, but it seems to me like there has to be a connecting of assertions at some point, and i think connecting these small studies would inform them just as putting a part of a machine into a simulation of the machine and having the machine either work or not work would inform the process of creating the part.
It doesn't help that there aren't many killer applications of a whole brain understanding, at least that the few corporations involved in brain research are willing to see. Most applications that involve making money seem to be centered around developing an almost autistic understanding of a single process in the brain (memory for alzheimer's and dementia research, mood for the psycho-pharmaceutical companies, etc.), and university researchers seem almost afraid of stating any conclusions about the brain in general for fear of being wrong.
So, I've been doing a lot of thought experiments and studying, and not a lot of anything that you would want to read about on a blog. Most of the time I find myself wandering around in a daze, puzzling over the implications of a certain assertion about the functioning of the brain, trying to picture giant logic charts in my head. When I'm not doing that either have my head shoved hermetically into a piece of graph paper doing a problem, or reading/watching on the computer until my eyes or head hurt, whichever comes first. It doesn't help that my hours at my day job have recently been cut back, so my ability to buy equipment has been decidedly hampered.
But I promise you this, I am still most definitely interested and active in the topics of this blog, I'm not dead, and haven't abandoned this site as so many people do with websites after a month or two. I've just found myself without anything to publish, or so I thought until I look above this cursor and see a huge screed laid out (though arguably more of it seems to be about what I haven't figured out than what I have figured out, but there's something about wisdom that comes to mind when I see that). I'll continue updating as I come upon things worth blogging about, but can't promise there will be a heaping of blog posts for whoever reads this every week, or every month for that matter. Put me on your update list and keep an eye out, but holding your breath may prove unhealthy.
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