Whetstones and nerve conduction

I was just reading my old journals due to boredom and discovered I'm something of a witty little fellow, eh?

Hehe, I was reading about how my mind tends to wander in such funny ways. Holding someone's hand and starting to think about nerve conduction and electron manipulation, then forgetting I was holding someone's hand and moving my fingers around. Hehe.

I was beginning to wonder if I'd lost that silly sense of random scientific curiosity when I remembered I read about how the degree of amylopectin branching determines the "stickiness" of short grain rices just hours ago.

I also stumbled upon something I had been meaning to write but never got around to it. I've always been fascinated with our ability to talk to ourself in our heads. That is the most incredible thing. Firstly, language is symbolism. To paraphrase someone smarter than me, we use sounds to represent objects and actions and link them together with more symbols. Tiger is just some sound to represent that large striped thing that you need to run away from. So the fascination begins when we create language symbols for things that don't even exist concretely: love, justice... Now that's bizarre...

But then we can actually create words in our head. While brushing my teeth I considered that creating words in our head is the same as creating an image in our head or performing simple arithmetic. Or is it? Research actually shows that the same nerves fire when we see an object and imagine an object. So it's not the same. Broca's or Wernicke's area must fire when we put words together, opposed to the occipital lobe going to town while picturing an object. I wonder what happens when you perform mental arithmetic. 5 + 2 is most likely a recovery of memory from the hippocampus, but what about 27824/12?

What is so interesting to me about talking in your head is the ability for thoughts to flow so fluidly and orderly, opposed to the concentration and deliberation it takes to crunch numbers or attempt to continually construct mental images. I can talk all day long without pause in my head.

So what happens? When I think the word puppy I open and close some sodium membranes in some nerves in the language center of my brain. Some action potentials fire, but where do the efferent nerves terminate? Where does that potential get carried to? If I move my arm I'm sending an impulse to the arm, ya know, it terminates in a muscle that twitches my arm. If I speak puppy well then the end of the line is a collaboration between my vocal cords, mouth, tongue, lips, etc... but what about when you think something? Where does it go?

That oughtta keep me busy for awhile.

Reflection Eternal

It's rather surreal, or just plain hard to believe that I am about to give a speech at a high school graduation as a teacher. I only graduated from high school 5 years ago and now I am the teacher at the podium presenting awards to the graduating class. How strange. Tomorrow is graduation.

I remember being in high school with dreams of becoming a teacher. I think every student at one time or another wants to be a teacher, to make up for their own teachers' shortcomings or to be like that one great teacher they had. I remember watching one of my teachers one day in high school and thinking "I don't want to do that". Now here I am as a high school teacher, graduating my first class. Who would have thunk?

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I submitted my primary medical school application and now I'm waiting for my transcripts to be verified. Once everything is ready to go, secondaries will start to come, first from the schools that send them to everyone and then hopefully some after I've been screened first.

I don't like when people ask me what school I want to go to. I really don't care. Not because I'm a poor applicant or that I'm apathetic, it's just that I want to go to school. I don't care where because I'll be just as happy at an unranked school than at a top ten school in California. I just want to learn. Honestly.

Unfortunately there is a whole year before I can actually do that, but one step at a time. Complete all my grades by next week, go SCUBA diving on Koh Tao, work summer camp, go volunteer in Sri Lanka (maybe?), complete the first quarter, move back to the United States, then a whole flurry of things to do once I'm back there. Not like it's a chore what I'm doing here, I love it, in fact it's the returning to the US thing I'm not thrilled about.