Developmental Neurobiology

Staple childhood nostalgia follows: While growing up, I changed my mind about what job I wanted to do as an adult lots of times. I started with predictable choices, such as an astronaut or a robot scientist. Later on, I wanted to become a teacher. That was replaced by computer science, then by physics, biology, mathematics, until I ended up back in computer science (which is what I am currently studying). Still, I hold these sciences in high regard, especially mathematics (for which I have developed a fear over the past few years, ironically). Needless to say, I enjoy following these fields a bit even now and I would really love to dedicate myself more to them, even if it's just as a hobby.

For today's novelty, I decided to look into a science I've been neglecting. So, I was to read a scientific paper on a science I am unfamiliar with. After searching for a while, I came across developmental neurobiology, which is concerned with the process of the development of the neural system in animals, as far as I understood. I know a few things from here and there about how the brain works, mostly from Artificial Intelligence courses and a passing interest back in school. Of course, this university-level article I was to read was way above any understanding I might have, discussing very specific things, which my mind could barely grasp what abstract and general processes they were part of.

The book was Developmental neurobiology, by Marcus Jacobson, Mahendra S. Rao. At first, I started reading through chapter 9, "Guidance of Axons and Dendrites" but soon I had had enough and went back to the front cover, then started reading chapter 1. I was moderately surprised to find out that it was in not any less confusing. So, I just read.

Soon, I discovered that it discussed the initial process of the formation of neural systems in embryos. It had four case studies, which is four different animals: The xenopus (a type of frog), the chick, the mouse and... well I forget which one is the last. They had their differences but each had some different advantages in being studied, like how the mouse was easy to genetically manipulate and how the xenopus was easy to manage and observe.

There seemed to be lots of keywords, around which other concepts were explained. As time passed, I began to pick up things about these and eventually I managed to decipher what some of them meant. Still, I didn't understand much from the context about most. However, this enabled me to do something else. Since semantics were removed for the most part from my understanding, I began to clearly see the structure of the text: I slowly was able to see the objects under discussion and which their properties were. I could see processes described and how their steps worked. Since I love abstraction (you should, too!) it was rather interesting to aknowledge the structure meta-data of the text.

Sequential Knowledge

When I was younger, my parents sent my brother and me to summer camps. Save for the first time, it was always the same one. It made for good times and good memories, I guess... most of the time. Anyway, you know how these things have many little cabins? The funny thing is that we always ended up in cabin #16. I'm not sure if someone was doing it on purpose but for all the four or five summer months I spent there, I didn't get to sleep in any other cabin than that one. It was the worst one too. It was half-buried into the earth on one side, with a window exactly there. It was hell to clean it and we had to do so every morning. This has led me to loosely associate the number 16 with fatalism.

Now, you may wonder: "What kind of one-of-a-kind one-hour activity relates with someone's experiences from summer camps? Well, I'm sorry to disappoint but it was just a trap to make the reader wonder that. For this day's novelty, I did reading again. I picked up volume 16 from the home encyclopaedia and just started reading it. I read about "kamikaze", furnaces, the Camorra, bells, bell towers, a handful of important historical and/or mythological figures and an indeterminate number of small villages. As always, keeping my concentration was half the work I had to do; only now am I realising how bad this thing is.

So, among other things, I learned that:

• Kamikazes were named that because the same name was used before for a wind that created problems for the Mongolian fleet when it tried to attack Japan.
• There are way more types of furnaces than I thought there were.
• Bell towers took their shape from watchtowers.
  
• Greece is full of little villages that just need to have an entry in an encyclopaedia.
• Tommaso Campanella lived an interesting but tough life (and I really liked him for some reason).