The Past and Pending

As you may have noticed, I have been incredibly busy of late and haven't had time to update my blog. I just began my neuroscience block, so I am going to jump straight into entries concerning neuro, and will retroactively add entries for what was left of my intro to disease block. It is kind of strange because we have our first week of neuro, immediately followed by spring break, after which we continue where we left off and then have our first test. I am going skiing in Colorado with my friend Steve and his brother for spring break, and I am pumped.

First things first. Yesterday we began the neuroscience block, and we kicked it off with a lecture on blood supply to the brain, followed by a lecture on ventricles of the brain and circulation of cerebrospinal fluid. We then had our introductory neuro lab in which we examined gross external features of the human brain. We have 2 "brain buckets": the first contains a whole brain, as well as a half brain (left or right). The second contains two sliced brains, the first sliced many times horizontally, and the second sliced many times sagitally (vertical, lengthwise). Overall an entertaining lab, and future labs should prove to be interesting.

Today, we had 4 lectures covering various topics. The first was over neurotransmitters and receptors, followed by basic neural mechanisms and neural circuitry. We then had a lecture on neurotransmission physiology at the neuromuscular junction. The final lecture was the first of what will be the bread and butter of neuroscience: neural pathways. The first pathway we went over was the dorsal column pathway, which transmits discriminative touch, pressure, vibration, and proprioception signals from the body and posterior 1/3 of the head, up to the sensory cortex of the brain.

Although the biochem stuff really blows, the pathways and anatomy are very interesting and this block should prove much less tedious than intro to disease. More updates coming soon.