Class

One of the most fascinating things about this class to me is the difficulty that comes with explaining it to other people. In most classes any person would be able to come in on any given day, say a biology or music class, and be able to partake in the class without any problem. In this class however, in example when the girl that wasn’t in the class (I can’t remember what her name was) came to the class and upset people by not quite conforming to the methods that the class uses. What was even more difficult than trying to explain this class to other college students was trying to explain the class to adults. I had the best time trying to explain the class to my mother over Mother’s Day. How do I explain Plurk to someone that has only just begun figuring out how to text message? I even logged in to my Plurk page to try and show it to her and she just kind of stared at me with an empty look in her eyes. Despite my best efforts to encourage her to make her own plurk (she finally just got into Facebook, along with my father and my grandfather) she was simply too confused with the entire idea of it. How do I explain that a large part of my grade is writing blog posts that have no prompt and yet is still effective? (Actually a lot more effective in a think-out-of-the-box way or just think damn it). Or the fact that we are doing a book group in which one of the main objectives is to challenge and evaluate each other on a grading scale that we create?
The class in itself has so many layers that in many ways can be hard to actually find a connection between them. Half the time in class I’m wondering what the fuck is going on and how exactly the topic of discussion relates to anything and everything. I think that one of the strongest parts of this class is the way that despite having no idea what is going on, the content that is discussed continues to eat at you throughout the day. I may not know what exactly is it that is hovering at the edges of my brain, but that doesn’t change the fact that in many ways, even when I’m not actually paying attention to it, my brain is still trying to digest the class long after it’s ended for the day. Now how many of my other classes actually do that? Most often when I go to any other class I sit and zone out for a good fifty minutes and then I leave and completely throw every useless piece of information away. Yet almost every aspect of this class intrigues me, mainly because I don’t really get everything that is going on and the fact that I’m really not supposed to simply get everything.
One of the most amusing things about this class is how all-consuming it is. I love that friends of mine who aren’t in the class are conversing with people who are in the class. (Hell, some of these friends of mine, caitliners and rohansignh, I haven’t even seen in years and yet now, despite the fact that I’m friend’s with them on Facebook, I am actually talking to them again). I especially love how Alex (facecrook), who has been a close friend of mine since I was in junior high, not only orchestrates coffee dates with me through Plurk, but actually really helps me to develop my thoughts about things relating to class. I, being a science and math type mind, am extremely shitty at trying to analyze or put any of my thoughts into words, but simply sitting down and talking with Alex over coffee makes a big difference. As I mentioned on Plurk earlier last week, every time Alex and I get together we always spend a lot of the time talking about Prichard’s class. Despite the fact that Alex is not in the class, he reads many of the texts, participates on plurk, and has discussions with people in the class (such as me and Brian) and even sees/talks to Prichard sometimes. Alex is in many ways getting just as much out of the class as any of us are and yet he is not in the class and has never physically shown up to it. Now really, how many other classes can do that with its students?

Secrets of the Mind

At the very end of the class discussion today the idea of kinship was brought up as well as the idea of being able to recognize the differences in one’s reality, in someone’s loved ones. In the Twilight Zone-esqe story that Prichard told, the idea of coming home and having a pet look, feel and act the same, and yet have this strong sense that the pet is not the same pet. Despite the fact that the pet would respond to the same cues (such as its name or the tricks that you’ve taught it), there would still be this overall feeling of difference, that something is simply not right. This idea and the comments that students had (such as the comment about having family move to a new location and then going home, knowing that it is still your family but having the overall feeling of difference, of change, of not recognizing parts of your world) reminds me of a video that I watched in class in Psychology 101 (Secrets of the Mind with Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran). The video introduced a man, who after some form of head trauma, returned home from the hospital months later and felt that it was not his home. He recognized his parents, his house, his belongings, but he was completely convinced that his parents were not his parents and his house was not his house. He believed that his parents were actors or ‘imposters’ as he called them. He would speak to his ‘parents’ as if they were imposters about his ‘real parents’ (saying things like “my real father wouldn’t have said that”). Interestingly enough the young man would recognize his parents on the phone, so the ‘imposter’ could leave the room, call the son and the son would believe that he was now talking to his real parents. Ramachandran used this special case to delve into the human mind, trying to figure out what exactly it was that had changed in the patient’s brain due to the damage. Ramachandran concluded that the part of the brain that is responsible for recognizing faces, kin and companions, is separate from actually perceiving the face (which is the amygdala, the basic emotion house of your brain, which in this case processes the emotions of what you see). I was absolutely fascinated with this case study, listen to the young man try to key in and understand why exactly he thought his parents were imposters. It was interesting to see that the young man had all the same memories of his parents but still didn’t believe that the ‘imposters’ could really be his parents. (another talk about the same case http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html)

A second topic that was touched on in class as well as in the third part of the Technopolypse video was the idea of omnipresence. This, once again, immediately made me thing of the same video (I love when I actually feel like I am learning things from classes, when things come up again and I can relate it to another topic of discussion) but a different case study. Ramachandran did another similar case study that addressed the topic of spiritual feelings and a certain part of the brain. According to research on people with epilepsy or people who simply have seizures in the front left temporal lobe of the brain, tend to get out of body experiences, strong religious feelings, and in some cases the belief of being abducted by aliens. In the Secrets of the Mind video Ramachandran did a study on a man who had seizures in his temporal lobe that caused him to hallucinate and feel spiritual. After a seizure he could literally feel the grass, trees, flowers, every single thing around him. The man felt like God, that he was God, and as he stated in the video, “No one is going to call the police on God”. The man felt that everything was a part of him and that he was a part of everything. The left frontal lobe is the specific location where spiritual feelings come from, and people are researching devices that will specifically stimulate that part of a person’s brain, allowing them to have permanent access to these ‘God like feelings’. Is it possible that extremely religious people, those who believe that God speaks to them, are simply using more of their left frontal lobe and therefore getting more spiritual thoughts? Can an atheist be turned into a religious person by merely using electromagnetic pulses aimed at that part of their brain? Is the idea of God or the ability of being omnipresent completely and 100% something that remains in the human brain? In that case, what is God? http://www.everythingispointless.com/2007/02/ramachandran-temporal-lobes-god.html

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Because I feel like the swine flu has managed to affect our plurks, discussions and lives despite the fact that not a single person in this area has it, I thought this would be a perfect time to blog about my interest in viruses. Ever since I was young I’ve had a very strong and very strange obsession with viruses and diseases and basically anything that is deadly and relates to the medical field (hence my desire to work in medicine for years). I was the girl in high school who got excited after watching a video on the Ebola virus in class. The last time that the avian flu craze happened (I believe I was a sophomore in high school) I was fascinated with it, checking the news websites every single morning before school. I find that there is nothing more terrifying than diseases, and being a horror fanatic, my favorite movies are always the ones that have to do with quick spreading viruses (28 Days Later, Cabin Fever, Resident Evil, Quarantine, Doomsday etc). I can honestly say that my obsession with zombies is most likely a small piece of my overall love of viruses. Hell, I even love reading books that are about viruses, such as Infected and Contagious!

Nine Movie Viruses Scarier than the Swine Flu:
http://www.horror-movies.ca/horror_15047.html

One of the things that fascinates me most about the swine flu (and the avian flu, SARS, etc) is the mass panic and hysteria that began and how it gets more and more out of hand. Within hours of reading the news about the swine flu on MSNBC I heard people talking about it everywhere. In classes, on plurk, on my way to work, on every single news website, etc. I love how easy it is to get up to date news online, but it would seem that technology has found its way into feeding us the panic. Even the Center of Disease Control has a damn Twitter! I’m just surprised they don’t have a Facebook and a Myspace too (I haven’t actually checked but in order to keep some respect for this technology insanity I’m not going to check). Not only did Twitter help to spread the panic of the swine flu pandemic, but I found it quite amusing that people managed to create a hoax by twittering a news story on what was flagged as actually a real BBC article. The news story was as follows:

“EU Quarantines London in Flu Panic”
There has been a small outbreak of “zombism” in London due to mutation of the H1N1 virus into new strain: H1Z1. Similar to a scare originally found in Cambodia back in 2005, victims of a new strain of the swine flu virus H1N1 have been reported in London. After death, this virus is able to restart the heart of it’s victim for up to two hours after the initial demise of the person where the individual behaves in extremely violent ways from what is believe to be a combination of brain damage and a chemical released into blood during “resurrection.” (http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/05/01/london-is-not-quarantined-by-zombie-swine-flu-yet-tweetmeme-lets-hoax-bbc-story-go-unchecked/)

Actual website for the fake BBC site: http://bouncewith.me.uk/europe/8027043.htm
This website even leads you to ANOTHER fake news article referring to the past disease ‘found in Cambodia back in 2005’
http://web.archive.org/web/20050428004220/http:/65.127.124.62/south_asia/4483241.stm.htm

How is this not completely amazing? And the fact that the said ‘tweet’ was spread thousands of times in the past couple days. And I will admit myself that when I saw the news article about it the first thing that went through my mind was “Hell yes!” before I actually had time to realize its obvious hoaxness. I have been having a lot of fun (yes I did use the word fun) tracking the swine flu on FluTracker (http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/ though I am curious how this says there are confirmed cases in Washington when I’m pretty sure there are only 45 suspected cases).

What exactly is it about viruses, blood, death and mass hysteria that for some reason fascinate me? I have absolutely no idea but I have done a lot of field research to try and figure it out. I have stood in protective clothing and a face mask, watching as someone with the Flesh Eating Virus got their necrotic skin cut off. I have held a human brain in my hands after watching a doctor saw through a lady’s skull. I have seen a woman die from internal bleeding and a man freshly pulled from a fire with over half of his body melted off. I have sorted and arranged by date hundreds of containers full of body parts and hardly even noticed the cracked jars that leaked formaldehyde on my hands.

I’ve been eagerly waiting for years for an actually interesting virus to actually spread necessary panic and unfortunately I’m pretty sure that swine flu is not it. The amount of freaking out that has happened worldwide is far more drawn out by technology then needed (kind of like SARS if I remember correctly) and is consuming our lives more than is necessary.