Karen Ginsburg's blog

Tickling was always an interesting concept to me.  When we’re tickled, we laugh.  Laughing generally is a sign of joy, or happiness, but when forced, for example, when being tickled, it isn’t as pleasant, or pleasant at all.  I didn’t like that I didn’t have control over what was going on when I was being tickled- that I couldn’t catch my breath from laughing as easily as I could if I was in control.  Later on, someone suggested to me that it was impossible to tickle ourselves to the same effect as if someone else was tickling us.  I wondered if the reason for this was due to a correlation between this feeling of lack of control and the stronger reaction of being more ticklish.  While interest in this topic has only recently greatly emerged and ideas are still being developed, researchers have actually found a part of the brain they believe to be responsible for our ticklish reactions- the cerebellum (1)

The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller, is about the child who was so aware, consciously or otherwise, of the wishes of his parents and had such a strong desire to fulfill them, that he lost track of himself and his own identity.  It’s about the child who never discovered his “true self” because he was so concerned with pleasing those around him, and the repercussions of that later in life, as an adult.  The book discusses the unconscious wishes of the parent being often unconsciously bestowed on the child, with the child absorbing these wishes and morphing into this different person.  The Drama offers help by explaining the problems and consequences of growing up in this way, and suggestions for steps as to remove himself from the person he is not, and move towards finding his “true identity”.  While full of useful concepts, this book seems to blame and manipulate situations in order to victimize the child-turned-adult, creating an interesting dynamic for the readers in regards to not only their relationships with themselves, but also with the author.   

I can’t imagine being thoughtless as a way of life. The only time I ever think of myself as thoughtless, more or less, is on a tennis court, where tennis is my only thought. Even then, I’m thinking; thinking about the game, the moment, the point. I observe and respond- this is my logic. To be thoughtless, to me, would mean that I act without this logic, without any reasoning. Is it better to be ignorant and simple, or aware and complicated? Is thoughtlessness ignorance? Does being aware necessarily equal complication? I’ve grown up being taught that thinking about issues, about lessons being taught in school, is the most beneficial way to gain the most I can out of my academic life. Now, in this moment, I wonder whether I’d be happier to not have adapted this mentality. I say those dreaded words, wonder that forbidden thought, thinking that life could be much simpler if I didn’t take responsibility for what I see around me.

We all eat to survive. We need calories, and nutrition, and for our cells to bed fed in order to function. Beyond that, though, lies a realm of questions. As humans, we have an interesting relationship with food. We crave certain foods, and are sometimes told that we’re craving just what we actually need- that if our body is craving orange juice, it may be because it’s lacking in vitamin C. However, quite often, we crave foods with little nutritional value (1). What is our body telling us then? Can we distinguish between something we greatly enjoy the taste of, versus something the cells in our body need in order to grow and replicate? With these cravings, has food- sugar in particular, become an addiction to us, like drugs? Researchers are finding foods with sucrose- the white, crystalline sugar, may have an addictive quality, perhaps explaining why we so often crave the foods containing this that we know aren’t very nutritionally beneficial to us.

From the very beginning of our academic experiences with biology, we were taught about basic needs. Most textbooks covered these basic needs in a systematic kind of way: they listed, discussed, explained, and moved on. We were tested on them: asked to recite, relay, and paraphrase. After going back, now about 12 or 13 years later, and looking at textbooks and websites, I realized how limiting these basic needs were. The most popular, seemingly most agreed upon basic needs of living organisms, were the needs for food, water, energy, oxygen, living space, and to be able to maintain the conditions inside of oneself, better known as homeostasis (1, 2, 3). While these describe physical necessities, I started to wonder about the importance of another major class- the importance of emotional desires- are these needs? Maybe we can’t measure, to the degree we can the physical, but there appears to be a major lacking in biology in attention to the more mental side of things. Maybe physical necessities keep numbers up and a heart ticking, but aren’t emotional desires a large part of what differentiates organisms? Aren’t our conscious minds- and understanding ourselves- a different, but perhaps just as real need- or desire- worthy of mentioning, even at the most basic biology level? If we’re taught in first or second grade about basic physical necessities- it seems that, in addition to teaching that food and water are necessary, we should be taught about emotions, even to the smallest degree that we could understand at that age.

Our brains play a large part in making us who we are. We have neurons that interact with the outside world, and we have neurons that interact within our bodies. These neurons create action potentials, and these action potentials make up our thoughts. We interact with the world around us by thinking and speaking and acting. Our thought processes are seemingly quite different, as no two people seem to think exactly alike, nor can most people (with the exception of the claims of seers and the such) read flawlessly other’s thoughts. New, controversial technology has been found to do what seemed the impossible- to predict people’s intentions- it’s scientific mind reading, with a scan to show the results. As huge a step as this is in the scheme of advancing knowledge of the brain, it’s important to consider just how complete this study is, and how dangerous this potentially could be.

There is a great deal of emphasis on love, especially in terms of romantic relationships, in our society. The so called “falling in love”, the wanting to be “in love”, and ending a relationship that once contained love are important phases for us, and ones that we spend a great deal of time talking and thinking about. Romantic relationships are an interesting phenomenon in society, as the pathway to one involving love is long and complicated, and so we may say “falling” or “ instantly fell” in love to avoid thinking about this long route. The associations with love, and all that the word brings to mind, makes it nearly, if not impossible, to define. While much research is still being done, there have been discoveries on the neurobiological basis for romantic love, involving an increase in specific chemicals, such as dopamine, which plays a major role in the reward system of the brain. Following these recent findings may make us better able to understand the effects of “love” on the brain, which has confused and baffled us through much, if not all, of human history.

Much of Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan, deals with looking at the Earth from a new perspective. In this perspective, we are, like in a lab we completed, new to this planet, in search of life or intelligence without any prior knowledge. Sagan discusses why this planet is so unusual, and the many oddities associated with it that can we see simply from looking and using basic measuring tools. This book overlaps with much of what we’ve discussed in the course, challenging what we’ve learned and accepted as basic knowledge. It’s a new kind of science that I was able to better understand with the idea of science as a story-telling, making this book particularly more useful to me now than it had been in the past.

Smiles are generally accepted as a universal facial expression of happiness or joy. We get instincts about which smiles are more genuine, are more felt than others, and which are more forced and more politely construed. I wanted to find out whether smiles are a social reaction- something learned amongst society- or whether there’s an actual biological reason why, when we are given a positive stimulus, our cheeks bulge and the corners of our mouths turn upward. I started with the understanding that because it would be difficult or impossible to define happiness on an individual level, which I am taking to be the stimuli of the smiles themselves, the results would have to be more generalized and the findings would probably be somewhat controversial and less conclusive. I proposed that smiling was more directly linked to a physical, neurobiological response than to social interactions, because I assumed that there had to be some reason why even the most creative and brilliant of thinkers followed the rest and smiled to show pleasure.