CoMO and what not

So it's been a bit. A couple weekends ago I went to Columbia Missouri for Mizzou's Homecoming.
Here are some highlights:

-Thai Kitchen and the perma-stoned waitress that told us our food looked good but smelled even better as she set it in front of us. Also, the vegetable creatures that distracted me most of the meal.
-Having a slap fight with one Rachel Canania.
-Kabobs and beer under a tent cover.
-Grilling up some brats.
-Almost dying at El Rancho.
-Not going to 63 Diner.
-Jenna’s purse taking a few Jello shots.
-Being given a large glass of green label by a generous student council president.
-Dozer.
-Hanging out with girls watching Dawn of the Dead while they laid around like dudes.
-Sleeping in the maid’s quarters.
-Being completely stopped on the highway just about to enter Missouri as a final fuck you from Sucklahoma.

I am also going to Funfunfunfest this weekend. Very excited.

I have started officially submitting applications to graduate programs in neuroscience. It's nerve-racking pressing that submit button.

I am being included as an author on a couple posters to the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference 2010. It is being held in Montreal so I may be there next April. Very nice.

Here is a song I've had stuck in my head the last couple days:


Not much else to say at the moment.
I have been schooling a lot. I am learning a good amount about memory which is nice. Here is a question:
Can you delete a memory you already have? Think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind.
http://www.divshare.com/download/9169708-c63
This is a paper I did a presentation about. Basically they were able to get a rat to learn something simple. In this case it was "when you hear this tone, you're going to get shocked". Then they tested their memory. To do this, they played the tone and looked at how scared the rat was (how long the rat froze (rats have a deer-in-the-headlights kind of response to fear)). Then right at that moment that the rat was remembering the initial experience, they injected a drug. Then later when they tested the memory again, those rats that had been given the drug, did not show fear. One possibility is that the memory was actually erased. Another possibility is that the emotional arousal of it, the fear, was removed from the memory.
The idea that you can disrupt consolidation of a memory after learning is not new. Nor is the idea that you can disrupt reconsolidation of a memory after it is retrieved, but this paper is a clear example of it and has brought reconsolidation back into the spotlight.
A study that I have assisted in recently tracked the neural mapping of a location, by recording these things called place cells. Basically there are cells that fire when you are in a certain position in a room (for the rats it's on a maze). We then trained the rat to be afraid of a tone just like the above study did. When we played that tone while the rats were on the maze, we disrupted the place that the cells fired. Essentially we were able to get them to remap their environment on a neural level by playing a tone.

That's just some of the stuff I do/read.

I'm going to end it with a goofy song:



Have a good one. I'll let you know how funfunfunfest is.

P.S. My favorite pen died yesterday. This is upsetting.