Instead of working on the term paper that was due two days ago, and which I MUST finish before I leave for Madras tomorrow morning (Yaay!), I have for the past 7 hours:
-Obsessively read the Dilbert blog, which for your procrastinating pleasure, I highly recommend.
-Sat around and had a long, long conversation with roommate. Oh wait, this I do everyday. Very effective device of procrastination.
-Checked bloglines every 2 seconds, and email every 5 seconds.
-I'm blogging now.
In my defense, I read one very complicated and very interesting paper on the modulating effects of dopamine on hippocampal LTP and memory encoding via the VTA (Ventral Tegmental Area) loop. Which is jargon for: more dopamine, better memory. The dopamine system also happens to be where the brain's pleasure pathways lie. Groovy bit of science-trivia for the day: if you were to implant electrodes in a rat's pleasure centres, and wired the electrodes in such a way that every time the rat pressed a lever, the electrodes pass a tiny current that stimulates the pleasure centres, the rat will keep pressing the lever over, and over, and over again until it dies. Of thirst and starvation. Literally. Stimulating your dopamine pathway feels that good. Apparently it's even better than sex. So, is it any surprise that these same pathways are hijacked by a variety of drugs (meth, coke and opium for example)? The rat experiment is supposed to be a model for drug addiction, by the way.
Ok, back to work now. Also room needs cleaning, and bag needs packing. Yes, one bag is all I'm carrying. Lightest international traveller in the history of mankind. They ought to give me an award.
Is anyone else annoyed by blogger's (and gmail's) new habit of underlining words it doesn't know with squiggly red lines? As if it wasn't bad enough that Word does it. Aaargh.
*See here.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
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