The meeting went a little over as usual. Dr. Zivago asked me up front about a few issues surrounding the lab. I answered; he generally seemed to like the progress. He then launched into a paper we'd recently read...

The paper was published back in '85, a lost relic in a temple long forgotten. Yet like Indiana Jones was Dr. Ziv, for he revealed the knowledge.

Most psychologists think that you get shit like Panic Disorder and phobias from associating a really NASTY thing with a neutral thing, which then spreads out to damn near every related neutral thing. Say for instance you get bitten by a 5 foot wolf spider as a toddler. This view'd say that because of that bite, your subsequent fear of spiders, hairy things like your Uncle Sal's back, things with many legs like lobsters, and other related stuff that makes you nearly die from anxiety.

Most psychologists are fucked-in-the-head wrong.

See, you can be afraid of spiders or snakes to a phobic degree--but you don't HAVE to get bitten or even be scared by them to develop a phobia!

This paper basically says 'hey, some other process must be happening.'

To get at what that new process might be, we've got to cover our five funny things about phobias:

1) They're fears that don't need a context to come about. You can walk down the street, whistling, when suddenly you think about spiders and go nuts.

2) Your fear of spiders can generalize so that you're terrified of your Uncle Sal's back. The sad thing is I'm not joking...

3) Phobias do not go away easily.

4) You don't need to have a spider do something nasty to you for you to develop a phobia.

5) You could have seen spiders plenty of times before you got your phobia. Why didn't your punk ass get this phobia the first time you saw one? Why the 5,001st time?

With those in mind, the paper suggested that there are two types of learning: factual and contextual. In adults, you blend these memories like a milkshake.

For example:

Little Billy is wearing a pretty pony dress in the park and socks you in the crotch.

You remember the fact: Little Billy socked you in the crotch.

You remember the context: Little Billy is wearing girly gang wear while pimping his shit in the pizzark.

When you're an infant and up to 36 months old, however, your brain hasn't fully developed yet. You can process and remember stuff, but it's just factual knowledge--almost all of these memories lack context knowledge. To refer back to our darling Little Billy, then, the 'infant' version of you would only remember one thing: Little Billy socked me in the crotch.

These context-less, exclusively factual 'infant' memories are lost when you grow up into an adult. It's like going from Beta to VHS.

But wait: ARE infant memories lost? This paper argues no. When you get really stressed out by something, say like rape or finals, there's an area of your brain--called the hippocampus--that becomes dysfunctionally fucked the fuck up. This same fucked up area is what is undeveloped in infants and makes it impossible for them to remember context. So, when you get stressed, you literally drop back down to the infant style of making memories.

What happens when you start making memories that are facts, yet have no context? The five fun things about phobias I mentioned up above. Either:

1) Your brain recovers relevantly traumatic infant memories. Say you'd been raped as a 2 year old. If you're getting raped by some dude in the park, your brain may tap into that old memory--and that's when the fucked up phobia comes.

OR

2) Your sudden shift down to making infant style, context-free memories just fucks you the fuck up, plain and simple, and *boom* gives you a phobia.

And what's the moral of all this educational stuff? If you or someone you know gets raped (either literally or figuratively during, say, finals), go by your local pharmacy and order glucose. Order lots of glucose. Pump yourself or that friend with so much glucose and sweets and simple carbohydrates that they're higher than Keith Richards on angel dust and ether. You'll save yourself or your friend a shitload in therapy and/or drugs.

Of course, Dr. Ziv thought I was fucking nuts for wanting to jump out of an airplane, but apparently I'm the only sky-diver there.

----

Most of the rest of the day was spent tending to all the lab stuff. I literally mean all of the lab stuff.

There was:

*Writing up the protocol allowing us to anaesthetize rats with an opiate 1,000 times stronger than morphine, then giving them Electro-Convulsive Therapy. This is apparently "my" and Hideyoshi's project now. We don't have official approval to do this. My response: hey, it isn't my A-Class Felony.

*Working on the NIH grant

*Running down to the secret vault where all the controlled substances are kept and placing an order.

*Re-organizing all the rats in our colony, ordering most of them to be 'sacrificed' so we keep overhead costs down, spreading virally-contaminated bedding to the 16 rats we're using for our new breeding stock (since the non-harmful virus is key to understanding depression for us), then moving them to the holding room that hasn't been officially been approved yet by the Nazi Animal Research Council (NARC).

*Helping undergrads. The highlight today was talking with Attila about not getting forced into applying for graduate school by Dr. Ziv. We got a collaborative effort going on this one, making up quite a few great technicalities.

*Got my usual stuffed sausage and pepperoni pizza slice lunch (i.e. the most satisfying part of the day next to seeing that illegally gorgeous russian girl in the lab next door, who today wore a tight red shirt that..yikes, it almost drives me to be flirtacious. Last wednesday I'd even went into the room she worked in, smiled at her, made eye contact with her and wished her a happy thanksgiving--which sounds cute and slightly pathetic, but you've gotta know my obsession with formality and strangers to understand how hard that was..)

*Played engineer with a pair of alligator clips we're using to do ECT with (see above). I'm still working on how to make them metallic and firm, yet supple enough to be silky ear-clips. I'll just sand the teeth down, I guess.

*Spoke with Dr. Ziv about innumerable small details involving the 5 full projects we've got going. That reminds me, I need to send that email to the woman who got Dr. Ziv on the ECT idea in the first place; she's helping us analyze tissue samples from the morphine-saturated ECT rats.

*I can't remember the rest.

Rather than say anything, I'll quote what Attila said today: "Yeah, it seems like you do most of the work at the lab..and you don't get nearly enough credit for it."

Me in response: "Naw, I don't, but you know.."

At least Dr. Ziv was thoughtful today and didn't get wigged out when I'd rattled off the general situation surrounding something.

----

I also want to quickly mention that the season finale of "Carnivale" was a cock-tease, and not an especially satisfying one. I get the feeling it's going to be like a comic book in that sense--but I love the show. Not as much as Law and Order or Law and Order: SVU, but then that'd be damn hard to top.

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