I am back after a month long hiatus! These past four weeks, I completed my first round of science exams and am now enjoying a much needed holiday. The good news is that the exams went well and I am continuing on! There is room to improve for sure, but with some lessons in hand about how to tackle this stuff from first semester, I am looking forward to January 2009.
Human Anatomy turned out to be a very challenging and fascinating class- who knew there was so much to the human body? The course I took this fall included more information than any other class I have ever taken, and even so, it barely scratched the surface of what we're made of.
The class involved a lot of pure memorisation, and as I puzzled over the different layers of membranes that cover internal organs, or the structure of tunics in a blood vessel, I felt overwhelmingly inspired by the complexity of it all. How is it that all these seemingly different systems, organs, tissues, cells and chemicals come together to form a perfectly united and conscious living person? Like 'Zen and the Consummate Chemist' (an earlier post I wrote, scroll down if you want to read it) , I was fascinated by the notion that my classmates and I were all trying to learn this stuff, yet we all know it on its most intimate level. We experience it constantly for our entire lives without thinking about it. We live it. Fascinating!
How could a person ever think of themselves as un-coordinated, stupid, clumsy, or ugly with all of this going on?
I've posted before about the mind and the body being completely inseparable and beautifully entangled in one another. I really believe that our best learning and our best experiences happen when we stop trying to treat the mind and body as two separate entities. This anatomy class started to scratch the surface of just how true it is that the body and the mind rely completely on one another.
The example of this that struck me the most this past semester was in the last unit of the course, the nervous system. As we learned about the different tracts (bundles) of neurons that start in our cerebral cortex, continue through our spinal cords and end in all different parts of our bodies as nerves, we were reminded that 90% of these tracts cross over one another in the medulla oblongata (part of our brain stem that blends into our spinal cord). The proper term for this is 'decussation of the pyramids'. We are all familiar with this concept from having heard that the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body and vice versa. Why our brains have developed this way is not entirely clear. To me, it looked as though our brains purposefully entangle themselves in the body as much as possible, like a permanent embrace. The crossing tracts seem to me like the arms of the mind wrapping themselves in their own way around the life giving body, making sure that the two will never be apart.
The body, in compliment, provides everything the mind needs to keep the whole dance going for as long as life continues. If something threatens one or the other, both are affected. When something great happens, both react together.
It is interesting to reflect on how we separate mind from body in everyday decisions. A good example of this is to look at a professional athlete versus PhD historian. Athletes are often thought of as having great bodies and great talent, but are not necessarily admired for their intelligence. The opposite is true of the historian. She may not be terribly athletic, but is highly regarded in society because of her intellectual intelligence. One may admire or look down on the other because they may consider themselves to be opposites. Are they?
Is athletic ability not an obvious form of intelligence? Who's driving the bus here? We all know that the body does what the mind tells it to do, whether that be conscious or not, voluntary or not. Ask any great athlete or any great musician, or any great artist if all of what they do is owed to "talent". It's insulting to many, actually. Most will say that they are blessed with certain inherent abilities, but that will only get a person so far. After that, it's the person's commitment to their craft, their ability to learn from their mistakes and their ability to focus under pressure that allows them to enjoy the success that they achieve.
Ask the same question to any great intellectual. Is the success that they achieve owed only to the fact that they are smart? Likely the person will say that while yes, they are "smart" and may be inclined to learn some types of information more easily than others, their ultimate success relies on their commitment to what they do, their ability to learn from their mistakes and their ability to stay focused under pressure.
The great intellectual may not be able to shoot a ball through a hoop with any degree of finesse, but the act of reading, writing and processing PhD level papers require a phenomenal amount of mind/body coordination when you think about it. The athlete may not be able to write a paper for submission to a peer reviewed journal, but the constant stream of decisions that they have to make in performance to compete in a game require great smarts.
All of us are able to walk into our homes late in the evening and turn on the lights without being able to see what we're doing, most of us drive cars, and all of us can read and write. These simple acts that we perform without even thinking require great coordination and intelligence and yet so many people spend their days talking down to themselves and reprimanding themselves for not being better, fitter, smarter or what ever else. Just who do we think we are to talk to ourselves this way? Often people will verbalize this is terms of "I was talking to myself". Well, who exactly is 'I', and who exactly is 'myself'? For the sake of argument, let's say that 'I' is the mind and 'myself' is the body. Does it make any sense at all to place them in opposition to each other when they are incapable of functioning without one another?
The example of this that struck me the most this past semester was in the last unit of the course, the nervous system. As we learned about the different tracts (bundles) of neurons that start in our cerebral cortex, continue through our spinal cords and end in all different parts of our bodies as nerves, we were reminded that 90% of these tracts cross over one another in the medulla oblongata (part of our brain stem that blends into our spinal cord). The proper term for this is 'decussation of the pyramids'. We are all familiar with this concept from having heard that the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body and vice versa. Why our brains have developed this way is not entirely clear. To me, it looked as though our brains purposefully entangle themselves in the body as much as possible, like a permanent embrace. The crossing tracts seem to me like the arms of the mind wrapping themselves in their own way around the life giving body, making sure that the two will never be apart.
The body, in compliment, provides everything the mind needs to keep the whole dance going for as long as life continues. If something threatens one or the other, both are affected. When something great happens, both react together.
It is interesting to reflect on how we separate mind from body in everyday decisions. A good example of this is to look at a professional athlete versus PhD historian. Athletes are often thought of as having great bodies and great talent, but are not necessarily admired for their intelligence. The opposite is true of the historian. She may not be terribly athletic, but is highly regarded in society because of her intellectual intelligence. One may admire or look down on the other because they may consider themselves to be opposites. Are they?
Is athletic ability not an obvious form of intelligence? Who's driving the bus here? We all know that the body does what the mind tells it to do, whether that be conscious or not, voluntary or not. Ask any great athlete or any great musician, or any great artist if all of what they do is owed to "talent". It's insulting to many, actually. Most will say that they are blessed with certain inherent abilities, but that will only get a person so far. After that, it's the person's commitment to their craft, their ability to learn from their mistakes and their ability to focus under pressure that allows them to enjoy the success that they achieve.
Ask the same question to any great intellectual. Is the success that they achieve owed only to the fact that they are smart? Likely the person will say that while yes, they are "smart" and may be inclined to learn some types of information more easily than others, their ultimate success relies on their commitment to what they do, their ability to learn from their mistakes and their ability to stay focused under pressure.
The great intellectual may not be able to shoot a ball through a hoop with any degree of finesse, but the act of reading, writing and processing PhD level papers require a phenomenal amount of mind/body coordination when you think about it. The athlete may not be able to write a paper for submission to a peer reviewed journal, but the constant stream of decisions that they have to make in performance to compete in a game require great smarts.
All of us are able to walk into our homes late in the evening and turn on the lights without being able to see what we're doing, most of us drive cars, and all of us can read and write. These simple acts that we perform without even thinking require great coordination and intelligence and yet so many people spend their days talking down to themselves and reprimanding themselves for not being better, fitter, smarter or what ever else. Just who do we think we are to talk to ourselves this way? Often people will verbalize this is terms of "I was talking to myself". Well, who exactly is 'I', and who exactly is 'myself'? For the sake of argument, let's say that 'I' is the mind and 'myself' is the body. Does it make any sense at all to place them in opposition to each other when they are incapable of functioning without one another?
