The Psych Student

Illustration by R. Jay Magill

Life’s hard knocks is currently keeping me from further studies, hence the crickets you may hear around this blog for the last while. It’s really quite infuriating. The above illustration is  is very representative of depression’s triggers, though. Six of the above depicted items feature into my life as of late, which has led me to put schooling and much else on hold while sorting things out and deciding how much a single life can actually hold.

(Via: PonderAbout.com)

Zombie girl image source from io9. I'll give anyone who can name the movie it's from a Skinner Box food pellet as a reward.

The blog io9 has a a funny/facsinating post on  the explanation of zombie (the film variety as opposed to the voodoo folktale sort) brain functions as offered by Dr. Steven C. Schlozman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a lecturer at the Harvard School of Education.

“Absent a properly functioning frontal lobe, a zombie is driven entirely by base emotions – such as rage – that are housed in the primitive parts of our brain, notably the amygdala. There’s precedence for this in nature. A crocodile brain, for instance, is mostly driven by the amygdala. Researchers have confirmed this by introducing lesions into the amygdala of animal specimens: the result is a drop in the attack and retreat response that correlates significantly with the amount of damage that’s done to that region of the brain. A crocodile without an amygdala isn’t really a crocodile. As such, Schlozman argues, ‘you can’t really be mad at zombies, because that’s like being mad at a crocodile,” adding that it’s the delicate balance between frontal lobe and amygdala ‘that makes us human.’ ” - Schlozman

Schlozman’d explanation is laid out in a phony medical journal article in which he identifies the disorder seen in films such as Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later as “Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome.”

One question in the article that remains unsolved, but is seemingly somewhere outside of brain function is “If zombies are constantly eating, then how come they never poop?”

Read: A Harvard Psychiatrist Explains Zombie Neurobiology

Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology, neurological sciences, neurosurgery and biological sciences, was selected to talk by the Stanford University graduating class.  His speech was a great way at showing how optimistic an outlook it is to embrace the fact that we’ve got very little not in common with most other animals, particularly our closest ape cousins, and how once we figure that out our specific niche we paradoxically face the challenge of pushing beyond it, which is the thing that makes us different.