Well.. I now have conclusive evidence that there is, in fact, something inside my head... and that something looks strangely like a human brain!!
I got an fMRI done today, and it has been one of the top experiences of my year.
Even though it's not super interesting with all the details, I'm going to chronicle all of them more for my sake than necessarily anything else.
I get to the brain imaging building and am shown into the back where there are the imaging computers and a couple of desks etc. I'm run through the questionnaire by this nice old man who is very good about explaining the 'whys' behind most of the stuff, perfect for my inquisitive nature. The PI explained that there would be three phases to the procedure: 1)lay on the floor looking at a computer screen and, according to the directions of the various subparts, either speak the short phrase or mime it out. The phrases were stuff like, "water the flowers" and "wash the dog". Following that section, I did two easy peasy Sukodu puzzles (1-4). Probably distractor tasks. Then after that's done, the PI explains to me that the first task was a memory task--that the third and final part of the study (in the actual fMRI machine) would be recalling which of those phrases I had previously seen. He obviously couldn't tell me that ahead of time or my knowledge of the purpose of that part of the study would skew the results by making me pay more careful "memorizing" attention to those items.
So they run through a final screening just to make sure I don't have any metal on me, and then do a metal detecting wand (very much like those at airports and sounding and looking very much like something out of Star Wars. They even called it the Vader Wand). Then I'm taken into the white, pristine looking room with the ominous looking machine waiting for me to slide right into its gaping mouth. I'm not nervous though, mostly excited. I lay down in the slidey table and the start hooking stuff up to me--two tubes that will administer the puffs of air onto my left foot and left hand, the response buttons for me to press (A for "yes I've seen that phrase before" and B for "no, i haven't") etc. I'm trying not to grin the entire time because I figure that's not the normal face of someone that will be stuck inside a high power magnet for the next hour and a half. Finally, everything is hooked up, I have a blanket over me (cuz it's kinda cold in the room), they snapped a coil (much like a hockey mask) tightly over my face and wedged my head in place with foam pieces, put the two mirrors on the coil to reflect the computer monitor image in front of my eyes, and $16,000 noise-cancelling headphones to combat the 100 db of the MRI. They raise the table and feed me to the machine.
Once inside, they turn on the monitor and talk through the intercom system directly into my headphones. "Are you good in there?" "Yeah." I must try not to move any part of my body while in the scanner, even to answer their questions.
The task: a phrase will flash on the screen and I'm to press the appropriate button for "yes I've seen it" or "no, I haven't". During some of the blocks there was a puff of air administered as the stimulus was presented. There were quite a few blocks, alternating which body part got the puff and whether there was a puff.
After the practice session, the PI got on the intercom in my earphones and commented that typically they see the fastest responses in young men (because of all the video games they play) but that mine were right on par with them.
After the first two blocks were done, the PI gets on again and says that he had looked at the first block of data and I was holding REALLY still. "Good job, Kristen. Keep it up." It was pretty hard to keep so still for so long, but I tried really hard. Every so often (and then when it was all over) they again commented about how still I'd stayed. Mission: Success.
Finally, when I could just barely focus any more, the screen said, "Thank you for participating. You will debriefed shortly." So then the researchers come and unhooked everything from me.
We go out to the computer and after a little finagling, Dr. Hackley pulls up a 3-D picture of my brain. There was a sagittal, coronal, and axial view, and each had a scrolly line to adjust. So you could start at the front of the skull and watch as you built the entire brain from front to back, side to side, bottom to top. It was, hands down, the most amazing thing I've seen in a loooong time.
There's my corpus callosum. There's my third ventricle, and my fourth ventricle. There's my frontal lobes--those make my decisions for me! And there's my basal ganglia and thalamus and cerebellum and brainstem. There's my pons and pituitary<--That makes my oxytocin and antidiuretic hormone. We found the hippocampus and the thing that runs along the corpus callosum whose name escapes me at the moment--we found it, w/e it's called. We found all the sulci and gyri. We found my visual cortex. We also found my optic nerve at the optic chiasm and traced it all the way to my retina. This is what's inside my head!! Sooooo coool!!!
I think what we were looking at was the structural scan (none of the functional hemoglobin measuring scans). So it was the basis upon which the other functional scans were based.
*Note: I'm really glad that I sat in on Boehm's neuroanatomy class last semester or I would have had no idea what I was looking at. Props for audits.
I'm gonna try and score a picture or a print out of my brain before I go home. Hopefully that's not against IRB protocol.
Either way, nothing like hands-on learning. And this is as hands-on on MY brain as I want anyone to get for a long time. Awesome day!
Monday, June 29, 2009
The Loathed Question Revisited
An excerpt from Oliver Sack's Awakenings:
"Yet we know so much of the devices of disease, and so little of the powers of health that are in us:
To well manage our affections, and wild horses of Plato, are the highest Circenses; and the noblest Digladiation is in the Theater of ourselves; for therein our inward Antagonists, with ordinary Weeapons and down right Blows make at us, but also like Retiary and Laqueary Combatants, with Nets, Frauds and Entanglements fall upon us. Weapons for such combats are not to be forged at Lipara, Vulcan's Art doth nothing in this Internal Militia... --Sir Thomas Brown
These are the terms in which we experience health and disease, and which we naturally use in speaking of them. They neither require nor admit definition; they are understood at once, but defy explanation; they are at once exact, intuitive, obvious, mysterious, irreducible and indefinable. They are metaphysical terms - the terms we use for infinite things. They are common to colloquial, poetic and philosophical discourse. And they are indispensable terms in medical discourse, which unites all of these. 'How are you?', 'How are things?'; are metaphysical questions, infinitely simple and infinitely complex."
This eloquent discourse serves to mitigate my antipathy towards that same platitudinous and banal question that so plagues our culture inasmuch as there is more metaphysical inquiries contained within its subtleties than most individuals are prone to envisage.
Consequently, Sacks goes on to state that "the whole of this book", which details the case studies of numerous patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica and/or severe Parkinsonian symptoms, "is concerned with these questions - 'How are you?", 'How are things?' - as they apply to certain patients in an extraordinary situation." Such extraordinary situations mainly entail being 'locked inside one's own body'--unable to move of one's own accord, to speak, subject to respiratory and oculogyric attacks, and possibly the most detrimental of all, a sort of 'loss of self', of a DESIRE to do anything. They no longer seem to care about anything--moving, eating, connecting, and, inasmuch as these desires are the essence of living, life itself. Furthermore, the accounts detail these very same locked in patients and the transformation they experience under the administration of L-Dopa: going from virtually paralyzed and lifeless, to walking and talking and relating, to manic episodes of destruction and uncontrollable libido, and finally landing back in the neighborhood of where they started, some a bit more pathological, some a bit less.
In Sack's characteristically descriptive and exquisite narrative style, these patients' stories seem to leap from the pages in very much the same sense that they exploded from their semi-paralytic states following their initial doses of L-Dopa. And he not only details the symptoms but the patients, the WHAT that is obvious as well as the HOW ARE YOU that is perhaps not so obvious but just as important if not more so.
Well done Sacks.
--D*sire
"Yet we know so much of the devices of disease, and so little of the powers of health that are in us:
To well manage our affections, and wild horses of Plato, are the highest Circenses; and the noblest Digladiation is in the Theater of ourselves; for therein our inward Antagonists, with ordinary Weeapons and down right Blows make at us, but also like Retiary and Laqueary Combatants, with Nets, Frauds and Entanglements fall upon us. Weapons for such combats are not to be forged at Lipara, Vulcan's Art doth nothing in this Internal Militia... --Sir Thomas Brown
These are the terms in which we experience health and disease, and which we naturally use in speaking of them. They neither require nor admit definition; they are understood at once, but defy explanation; they are at once exact, intuitive, obvious, mysterious, irreducible and indefinable. They are metaphysical terms - the terms we use for infinite things. They are common to colloquial, poetic and philosophical discourse. And they are indispensable terms in medical discourse, which unites all of these. 'How are you?', 'How are things?'; are metaphysical questions, infinitely simple and infinitely complex."
This eloquent discourse serves to mitigate my antipathy towards that same platitudinous and banal question that so plagues our culture inasmuch as there is more metaphysical inquiries contained within its subtleties than most individuals are prone to envisage.
Consequently, Sacks goes on to state that "the whole of this book", which details the case studies of numerous patients suffering from encephalitis lethargica and/or severe Parkinsonian symptoms, "is concerned with these questions - 'How are you?", 'How are things?' - as they apply to certain patients in an extraordinary situation." Such extraordinary situations mainly entail being 'locked inside one's own body'--unable to move of one's own accord, to speak, subject to respiratory and oculogyric attacks, and possibly the most detrimental of all, a sort of 'loss of self', of a DESIRE to do anything. They no longer seem to care about anything--moving, eating, connecting, and, inasmuch as these desires are the essence of living, life itself. Furthermore, the accounts detail these very same locked in patients and the transformation they experience under the administration of L-Dopa: going from virtually paralyzed and lifeless, to walking and talking and relating, to manic episodes of destruction and uncontrollable libido, and finally landing back in the neighborhood of where they started, some a bit more pathological, some a bit less.
In Sack's characteristically descriptive and exquisite narrative style, these patients' stories seem to leap from the pages in very much the same sense that they exploded from their semi-paralytic states following their initial doses of L-Dopa. And he not only details the symptoms but the patients, the WHAT that is obvious as well as the HOW ARE YOU that is perhaps not so obvious but just as important if not more so.
Well done Sacks.
--D*sire
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Trail Mix
A running analogy--trite I know. But hang with me. There's a reason that they're so ubiquitous...
You're running, feet pounding the pavement. A cool breeze revitalizes your energy and you feel so alive, so right. This is your Christian walk, when you first lace up the running shoes and take off, accepting Jesus into your life as Lord and Savior... and you start the race with Him. You run with energy toward the vanishing point, excited to be on this journey with him. But after awhile, just like the seeds planted among the weeds, life comes in and chokes in on your path. And you start taking your eyes off the goal, off of Jesus.
Ooo... pretty flowers... And you stop and play in them for awhile. Not harmful in and of themselves, but they impede your race. They distract you from what you're supposed to be doing.
The clouds are moving in in the distance... you start to worry about the future. What will I do if this happens; how am I going to survive if that happens. And your feet slow to a walk as you're consumed by thoughts of things that are out of your control.
Or you start to focus on the fact that you're running alone. It especially hits home when you see others in the trail running with partners. And you may find a dark shadowy place to crawl into and feel sorry for yourself for awhile.
And then out of the gloom and your self-absorbed knot you hear a voice: "Don't you trust me?"
You look up and can barely make out a shape standing on the path and holding his hand out to you.
You KNOW in your mind that he's right; you know that you DO trust him, somewhere inside... but it's just so hard to make your heart listen, to stand back up, brush yourself off, and start running again--still alone.
So he asks again, "Do you trust me?"
And you do, so you brace yourself, crawl out, take his hand, and start running again. The first little while is always the hardest, until you find your groove again.
Soon again, though, your eyes start to wander again, and your feet start to slow... It's times like these when you need someone to come along side you and encourage you to keep up the race. A friend comes along and runs with you for awhile and your energy is restored. With Jesus on one side and a friend supporting the other, you can make it through stretches that you look back on and think, "I have no idea how I made it through that."
You meet regularly at the watering stations and are encouraged by the solidarity of seeing a bunch of other runners. They know what you're going through; they know what the race is like, with its ups and downs. You leave the water break with a new found excitement and motivation.
But it's a constant battle against the dark woods that threaten to suck you in, against the scorching of the Texas sun threatening to make you pass out. And all the while is the voice of Jesus next to you, "I have run this race before; I know where you're going. I've planned it all out." And you just have to trust that he will guide you through each muddy puddle and ginormous hill and pull you back in when you want to crawl into a hole and stop running. You still have to experience those trials, sucky as they are; but as so many people have said before, you don't appreciate and value the downhills unless you know what the uphills are like.
You have to constantly be reminded of who it is you're running with, and for, and towards. And it's only the hope that his presence provides that keeps you going.
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith" (Hebrews 12:1-2a)
So that when it's all said and done you can say, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day" (2 Timothy 4:7).
Running is fun, rewarding, tiring, harder than all get out, but the feeling you get when you end up home really is worth the struggle.
You're running, feet pounding the pavement. A cool breeze revitalizes your energy and you feel so alive, so right. This is your Christian walk, when you first lace up the running shoes and take off, accepting Jesus into your life as Lord and Savior... and you start the race with Him. You run with energy toward the vanishing point, excited to be on this journey with him. But after awhile, just like the seeds planted among the weeds, life comes in and chokes in on your path. And you start taking your eyes off the goal, off of Jesus.
Ooo... pretty flowers... And you stop and play in them for awhile. Not harmful in and of themselves, but they impede your race. They distract you from what you're supposed to be doing.
The clouds are moving in in the distance... you start to worry about the future. What will I do if this happens; how am I going to survive if that happens. And your feet slow to a walk as you're consumed by thoughts of things that are out of your control.
Or you start to focus on the fact that you're running alone. It especially hits home when you see others in the trail running with partners. And you may find a dark shadowy place to crawl into and feel sorry for yourself for awhile.
And then out of the gloom and your self-absorbed knot you hear a voice: "Don't you trust me?"
You look up and can barely make out a shape standing on the path and holding his hand out to you.
You KNOW in your mind that he's right; you know that you DO trust him, somewhere inside... but it's just so hard to make your heart listen, to stand back up, brush yourself off, and start running again--still alone.
So he asks again, "Do you trust me?"
And you do, so you brace yourself, crawl out, take his hand, and start running again. The first little while is always the hardest, until you find your groove again.
Soon again, though, your eyes start to wander again, and your feet start to slow... It's times like these when you need someone to come along side you and encourage you to keep up the race. A friend comes along and runs with you for awhile and your energy is restored. With Jesus on one side and a friend supporting the other, you can make it through stretches that you look back on and think, "I have no idea how I made it through that."
You meet regularly at the watering stations and are encouraged by the solidarity of seeing a bunch of other runners. They know what you're going through; they know what the race is like, with its ups and downs. You leave the water break with a new found excitement and motivation.
But it's a constant battle against the dark woods that threaten to suck you in, against the scorching of the Texas sun threatening to make you pass out. And all the while is the voice of Jesus next to you, "I have run this race before; I know where you're going. I've planned it all out." And you just have to trust that he will guide you through each muddy puddle and ginormous hill and pull you back in when you want to crawl into a hole and stop running. You still have to experience those trials, sucky as they are; but as so many people have said before, you don't appreciate and value the downhills unless you know what the uphills are like.
You have to constantly be reminded of who it is you're running with, and for, and towards. And it's only the hope that his presence provides that keeps you going.
"Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith" (Hebrews 12:1-2a)
So that when it's all said and done you can say, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day" (2 Timothy 4:7).
Running is fun, rewarding, tiring, harder than all get out, but the feeling you get when you end up home really is worth the struggle.
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