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Update, what I research and brain-imaging 2002-08-23 - 8:36 p.m. 
Another week ends. Almost another month ending. June and July had crawled by like a parapalegic infant, by contrast. So far I think I've gotten settled into this home routine and I can deal with the long haul. This long haul might involve waiting until January for my newest job prospect. It lays far across the continent, in Tennessee at Vanderbilt University, where a scientist dwells and ponders over several areas of the brain, scanning seas of cells and squishy tissue with brain imaging techniques. To appreciate his work, my possibly getting involved in it and why I keep bitching about jobs, I thought explaining which field I'm involved in might be useful. The rest of this entry is educational; be warned. So, I was trained as a Biological Psychologist. Basically, I've studied the structure and function of the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system allows the brain to receive sensations and to send out actions to the body through the spinal cord. From the spinal cord, the 'extension' or 'side' nervous system relays central command's wishes out to control your gut, organs and muscles. What people like me do is take this biological foundation and look at psychological phenomena in one of two really broad ways: 1) How does the way we think and process information affect a certain part of this biological foundation (e.g. long-term health)? 2) How can damage to this biological foundation, say bad nutrition, a stroke, heart-attack, etc. affect a certain mental process? That's my discipline in a nutshell. My interests so far are learning and memory, as well as executive decisions about what to do, basically asking what are the biological foundations of these processes. I'm also interested in nutritional deficiencies, say with certain vitamins, and how they can affect thinking and well-being in the long-term. There's other stuff, but let's not go there. One of the ways I want to look at these sorts of phenomena is to use brain imaging. Hell, brain imaging is one of the reasons I became a scientist. Brain imaging can get complicated, but it's an overall interesting concept. Nowadays you can get a fairly good idea about what areas of the brain are most active at any given time. Since more active parts need more oxygen to process, and blood carries oxygen to the brain...you can directly see how much blood is flowing where and compare it to normal conditions. There are varying methods of scanning or tracing blood flow, but the basic principle remains the same. For example:
Here, a person had an operation that repaired a blocked head artery. Where they had had major deficits in control, moving, and other things...after the operation, on the bottom panel, you can see there's alot more activity. Again it's a basic concept, but you can apply it to alot of different questions you're interested in. The only thing barring you is the fact that the test subject has to keep his/her head still and you're restricting to showing things on a two dimensional screen. Even more exciting, though, are tools that actually allow you to short-circuit or stimulate a section of the brain temporarily. Sound scary? Trust me, human and animal ethics committees respectively make absolutely certain people have consented, can opt out at any time and are never harmed...and that animals are treated with dignity and subjected to the smallest amount of pain possible.I digress; brains kick ass. Yup.
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