明天, 今天, 昨天（ghostneuron）

The anatomical asymmetries of brain have been found in many animals bescides human, even honeybee. It seems the evolution prefer asymmetries for brain and heart, which are the most important organs in the body. Thare are some spliting brain cases, which are to help seisure patients, and as a side-effect, if those patients are right-handed, they are able to write words displayed to the left side of the brain, but not words displayed to the right, it ’s reasonable bacause the left side of the brain controls speaking, reading and writing in most people. And There is another case who is left-handed, when her brain was splited, she can write words displayed to the right side of her brain, but not words displayed to the left, which means the right hemisphere might control writing in left-handed people.

And interesting, when human is older than 25, the langusage center becomes blurred, with both hemisphere function rather than one domination. 

It’s the most beautiful day since the spring came this year, sunny and warm, fresh green on trees, small flowers out of grass, happy birds….I got up earlier to take a course in Cambridge. It’s on In Cell Analyzer, a fancy application of "high content screen" , most used in drug screen now, basically a extension of morphological method of analyzing cells with different markers at a high amount and speed. The speecher is a young man in middle 30s, quite energetic and clear thinking, I was fine in the morning, but got tired in the afternoon when he showed the data analysis, sleeping and worn out …..we had only four stdudents today, and 3 of us are Chinese. .. The moon is full tonight when I walk out of the lab, quiet night with fragrance sprilled in the air….spring is here!

There is a new research with fMRI showing we use the same brain area for imagination and memory… The important thing might be the CPU, organizing center.

I got up at 7:30 this morning, sleepy but still think of going to the symposium in Radcliffe Gymnasium near harvard squire. Then I went to the lab and did some experiment, left it, caught a shuttle to harvard squire, sleepy and dreaming in the moring sunshine….when I found my route to the building, it was already started, and the room was almost full, a splendid, classic hall with wooden shafts and floors and yellow lamps. It was a symposium discussing origins of life, with the most brilliant brains meeting here, there was some kind of aurora, just like the spectrum they are looking from the space and stars…I only heard one talk by a female professor from University of Arizona, who discovered many orgnic chemicals from planetary observations, such as glycoaldehyde. She looksed just like the style in science fictions and movies, smart, confident, optimistic and strong in speech. Her idea of looking for organic molecules from other stars and clouds to build up the origin of life from the evolution of stars as well as this molecules is just a new way of exploration compared to the old way of looking for water…The 2nd talk is on pyrite and rna stability, i almost fell asleep….then at the break, I took a coffe and have to leave for the experimnts, missing an interest talk on rna evolution…

 The new research finsally show the structure difference in men and women for human language….It seems women are good at abstract language because their brain are different from men. I was convinced all the time that gene decide most of your phenotypes, such as  personality, body, sex direction, hair colour…and as Dr House always said people don’t change. Yes, when you do some experiment, you can change the cellular or molecular activity by put some chemicals into the culture dish, the cells could grow faster, or die; but you have to knockout or knockin a gene into mice to get him change his behavior, become quiet or crazy, though drugs can also change it, it’s only temperary.   So in human case, if we want to change personality, we either knockout or knockin some genes, or take some drugs, better with conditioned gene inductions, that is you can change your personality as you need…so everyone become perfect, and also boring maybe later; then change again…what a beautiful game!

" The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world class expert_in anything. …ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day over 10 years."

___from <This is your brain on music>

Most people cannot reach this target even they do it for 10 years, but even genius like Mozart need 10 years to become world class expert…..and what we get concensus is that gene and eviroment play roles in fifty-fifty.

I went to a seminar today, it’s on neurophysiology study of memery in hippocampus of rats. They record electrical signals from singal cells, whcih is quite accurate response of brain activity when the rat doing memory works, such as running on a wheel. what they discover is that different cells in different brain area are responsible for different tasks, like space identify or object identify, and CA3 and Dentate gyrus is the structure where integration or binding of memory happens.