Skeletons in the loft

Tuesday 1 February 2022

There’s a skeleton in my loft.

Really; here’s a picture of it…

 

Obviously it’s not a real skeleton, just a plastic one that comes out once a year to be strung up at the front of the house to lure in terrified young trick or treaters at Halloween. There are many other things in the loft too with maybe a few skeletons from my past among them.

This week I started systematically going through the lifetime of clutter than is stored at the top of the house, with the objective of binning, or giving away, as much of it as possible. The reason is simple: with my Parkinson’s getting progressively worse I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to climb up the steep loft ladder, and more importantly, actually bring anything back down the ladder.

It may seem premature to start purging my life like this, but Parkinson’s forces you to plan ahead. The time to sort stuff out is now. Later might simply be too late, such is the unpredictability of the progression of this debilitating condition.

And so, I find myself leafing though old school books, university lecture notes, theatre and sports programmes, travel journals and notebooks, photos and love letters from my teens and twenties, and thirty years of corporate bumph. I repeatedly jam the shredder with wads of bank and credit card statements, rental agreements, car service reports, you name it: previously a meticulous record-keeper, none of this stuff seems to matter anymore.

There are boxes full of gadgets and cables, long out of date tech; even some VHS tapes and floppy discs – remember those?  There is sports equipment I will never use again: tennis, squash and badminton racquets, running spikes, power kites, golf clubs. There is climbing and mountaineering gear: ropes, carabiners, harness, mountaineering boots, crampons and ice axe that once took me over 6,000 meters in The Himalayas. Similarly, there is camping gear including a four-seasons sleeping bag, cooking stove and fuel.

There are a few things I’ll keep of course like some travel souvenirs, a few memories of childhood, and most of the photos. I will allow myself a little nostalgia, but most of it has to go sometime, so it’s better that it goes now.

I think the Halloween skeleton will stay, but, if not in the loft, then where…? And as for any other skeletons I come across, now seems like a good time to eradicate them. Forever.

The language of neuroscience

Saturday 15 January 2022

I am re-watching the lectures from last term as I prepare for an exam next week which is worth 10% of my Masters degree in neuroscience. Here is a typical piece of narrative, from a lecture about how the brain learns:

“The NDMA subclass of ionotropic glutamate receptors has long been known to serve as a coincidence detector that determines when both pre-synaptic neurons and post-synaptic neurons are active around the same time thereby meeting the conditions under which Hebbian synaptic potentiation should occur, and it does this because it is both ligand gated, which means that glutamate binds to it in order to open the ion channel, that allows positively charged calcium ions to flow from outside the neuron to inside the neuron; but it is also voltage dependent, which means that the post-synaptic membrane has to be depolarized, i.e. the post-synaptic cell has to be active for this ion channel to open…..” 

The crazy thing is that I actually understand what this means. Even my ageing, disease ridden brain, is a remarkable learning engine, evidently still able to acquire a whole new language, and put it to use.

In my student essays I now use fancy words like aetiopathogenesis, magnetoencephalography, xenotransplantation, and single nucleotide polymorphism, and occasionally I possibly even use them in the right context.

At first sight this new language looks impenetrable but it does make sense. For example, there are a lot of compound words, like in German.  So if you take “patho” which means disease, you can combine it with “histo”, which means tissue, to create ”histopathology” which means the study of the effect of diseases on tissue. If you take “aetio”, “patho” and “genesis” you get “aetiopathogenesis” which means the cause and development of a disease. Biology and medicine are complicated, so they tend to need a lot of fancy terms. The human brain is particularly complicated, so neuroscience adds a lot more words to the lexicon. 

Neuroscience is also fascinating. Indeed, I find myself getting distracted from my goal of getting into neurodegeneration research because there are so many other interesting things going on: awesome technology like fMRI and PET for neuroimaging; the incredible process of brain development from single cell to 86 billion neurons and an astonishing 100 trillion connections between them; many as yet unsolved mysteries like memory formation, sleep, placebos, visual perception, psychoses and biggest of all, how does consciousness arise?

I’ll be sure to write more about this stuff another time, but for now, I’d better get back to learning and memory, the connectome and in vivo cell reprogramming… 

Bah humbug

Thursday 16 December 2021

I don’t really like Christmas any more.

Writing cards, going shopping, wrapping presents, decorating the tree… all of them are, frankly, a pain in the neck, or, more literally, a pain in the hands. Everyday activities like getting dressed or grocery shopping are getting harder as it is without this burden of extra tasks requiring fine motor control.

I went to see my mother yesterday for a pre-Christmas gift-and-card-swapping visit and it was almost comical: mother and son, both with Parkinson’s, sitting on the floor trying to wrap a present for one of my brothers. We both fumbled for ages finding the end of the Sellotape, but eventually got a sort of system going. With trembling hands, she slowly folded the paper whilst I managed to stick the tape onto everything except the paper, and then eventually onto the paper itself. The end result wasn’t too bad but I have the distinct opinion that next year I need to be smarter: e-cards, or gift-wrapping services, or printed address labels or something. After all, it will only be harder in twelve months’ time.

We went for a short “walk” (shuffle might be a better word) near the house and played two games of scrabble and of course I gave her a back massage. It still amazes me how someone so thin and frail can have back muscles as hard as plywood. We even had a Parky power nap together – lying comatose side-by-side on the double bed in the spare room for ten minutes.

Despite our shared challenges, it was joyous to spend a few hours with her. As I departed into the cold darkness, I resolved to make the 7-8 hour round trip more often. She is lonely and craves human interaction, but she is also very much settled in her home and not keen to move, so I, and my siblings, need to travel to her.

When I returned home I looked at the pile of cards waiting to be written. It's sorely tempting to simply not bother.

Bah humbug. Yep, I no longer like Christmas.