Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Job Searching Schemes and Devious Thoughts

One of my goals right now is to find a job in life science research, preferably related to neuroscience and a job that does not require me to kill mice/rabbits/frogs/other vertebrates simply for a single organ or cells, or just because they have become unfit for the research. Anyway, while I am looking through university career sites as well as biotech career websites, I thought I would try out a different scheme. I would look through faculty of interest, and read a couple of their papers and then e-mail them about how much I love their work and why I would be a qualified and competent research associate.

So I printed out a couple of papers. The first one I read was a review paper related to the biomolecular mechanisms behind learning and memory, using the small marine snail Aplysia as a model of study. For a little history of the study of learning and memory in neuroscience: somewhere around the 1950's, investigators discovered that if you poke or shock (lightly, not fatally) the Aplysia, it withdraws its gill and siphon as a natural defense reflex. If you continue to shock a few times, and then lightly touch it a few hours later, it becomes sensitized to the touch stimulus, and withdraws its gill and siphon anyway even though your touch is pretty harmless. And if you continue to touch it harmlessly, it habituates and doesn't respond to touch stimuli any longer with its defense reflex. As life science research methods improved, the focus on learning and memory shifted to animals of higher complexity (such as rats and other vertebrates), and Aplysia drifted out of popularity. The paper I read essentially proposed to unify two disagreeing theories on the learning mechanisms in Aplysia, and explained that this was similar to findings in animals of 'higher intelligence'. The investigator further concluded that perhaps learning and memory mechanisms had developed early on in evolution and have been conserved through time, through natural selection. And I had an epiphany.

Neurobiology makes it difficult to believe in free will, since we are mostly controlled by mechanical, biochemical processes. So with that in mind (yes, first consider suspending free will, and then you can consider this part), I wonder if humans actually have control over their learning? We don't actually take the knowledge and concepts we want to remember and place them into our memory, we make up tactics to facilitate our ability to learn. We make up mnemonics, explain a difficult concept to ourselves a number of times before it sinks in, but we don't actually make it sink in, if that makes sense. Like the simple organism Aplysia, or even an earthworm, our learning and memory follows a few basic rules. If the basic learning and memory circuitry is essentially a passive process (aka no divine intervention, or other will at work), then why wouldn't the same be true for more complex organisms? Of course, the circuitry becomes progressively more complex as we travel through our evolutionary timeline. Complicated, yes, but still passive. Sort of like a supercomputer?

1 comment:

mirthbottle said...

remembering stuff and learning does follow rules. i guess we just don't really have a manual. but there are techniques that work because they take advantage of our own circuitry. so it's not like it's all passive since we can decide to use those techniques or not. so it's like a computer that is trying to figure out what commands to type into itself. also, we do have ways of "opening ports for inputs." for example, we can decide we want to watch out for a certain noise. then we can listen for it, and it's like when a microcontroller decides to configure one of its ports to take readings. there is this british magician/therapist darren brown who "reprograms" people to do different things and improve themselves.