During our visit to the Musée du Service de Santé des Armées, I spent a lot of time looking at glass bottles of old drugs, blood, and chloroform. While I had a blast, I had no idea that what would come next would blow my mind. On February 22, 1961, a little guy named Hector boarded a Véronique space craft, was shot into the atmosphere from the Sahara Desert, and remained in flight for 8 minutes and 10 seconds. Covered head to tail in electrodes and suited in what looks like a full-body strait jacket, Hector soared through the sky on his one-man space craft. Le Service de Santé des Armées wanted to send Hector up first to see how time spent in space effected the body…and it was a huge success! If you couldn’t tell by now, Hector was a rat and made his involuntary journey into space because this was the first time the French tried to send anything/anyone up. Like I said, Le Service was ecstatic because Hector made it back alive AND this was the first time in the WORLD anyone collected live recordings (from space!) from electrodes implanted in the cortex, the mesencephalic reticulate, and the neck muscles of a living animal. Thanks to Hector and a few others, this grand success was a huge win for Le Service de Santé des Armées, as they went on to share their findings with Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherches de Médecine Aéronautique. Continue reading “Everyone Needs a Hector”
It’s Not What It Looks Like!
During our visit to Le Musée des Moulages at l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, we got to see casts of everything from syphilis to eczema, bone tumors to blood cancer. The accuracy of each condition was a little eerie, but it was also really cool to see the attention to detail. The casts were developed to teach dermatology students about the varying diseases that plagued the French people in the 19th century. Though that was neat to see, the categorization of some conditions would be considered incorrect by today’s standards. One ‘mistake’ that caught my eye was the ‘hermaphrodite’ cast. The figure 1 caption below describes what doctors in 1883 thought of the condition, but it strikes some discord with newer findings.
Photo Post #5: Sounds Good, Feels Good
In Père Lachaise Cimetière lays the body of the great Frédéric Chopin, a famous composer and pianist. He primarily wrote solo piano pieces so you could imagine how much repetitive finger movements he made. In NBB 301, we learned about the effects of repetitive motion on the cortical representation of afferent neurons. You could imagine that the part of Chopin’s motor cortex that corresponds to his fingers were much larger than that of the average person. Well, maybe since we type on computers regularly the average motor cortex would look more like Chopin’s than in it would have 25 years ago?
Photo Post #4: Heads Roll
Where I’m standing in this photo is where the guillotine once stood. There are five bars on the ground that mark the footprint of the famous decapitation apparatus. There’s been a decent amount of speculation with decapitation regarding the conscious state of the head immediately following. Although the spinal cord is severed, the brain doesn’t die immediately, so I would argue that the head is not conscious enough to make any movements but still has some sensory input from the eyes and sensation in the head that are briefly being processed.
Photo Post #3: Cheesy Situations
At our visit to the fromagerie, we tasted many different types of cheese, including one that was featured in a recently published paper on the effects of dehydroergosterol on microglial inflammation activity – camembert. Though the photo doesn’t show camembert, it depicts a cheese fermented with a specific type of bacteria that creates a fuzzy blue and white rind. We learned from the paper that the type of bacteria used to ferment the cheese can change its biological properties. For camembert, Penicillium candidum fermented cheese decreases microglial inflammatory response by the greatest margin.
Photo Post #2: Face to Face
This painting was in Le Centre Pompidou and it caught my eye because I couldn’t decide if there were faces in it or not. At this point, I knew my fusiform face area was hard at work but my superior temporal sulcus wasn’t very active because there weren’t any changes in facial expression. In the end, I decided that there is at least one intentionally placed face with a red eye on the far left because I consistently recognize it thanks to my FFA.
Photo Post #1: Pair Bonding
When I visited Le Centre Pompidou, I came across this sculpture of a man hugging a girl who is kissing another man. I was quick to assume that the sculpture depicted an unfaithful situation, but then I got to thinking about pair bonding in prairie voles. Prairie voles, as compared to montane voles, have a higher concentration of oxytocin (in females) and vasopressin (in males) receptors that facilitate the formation of a strong partner preference. Although humans also have the ability to bond, they don’t share the same mechanisms with prairie voles. The science could argue that humans are more willing and able to break bonds than voles – not something most would expect.
What’s In Your Head?
Have you ever been told that you have a big or lumpy head? Well you might be in luck! Well, maybe, but most likely not…I’ll explain further. During our visit to the Musée de l’Homme, I got to learn about everything from Neanderthals to the history and science behind acupuncture. But there was one exhibit in particular that caught my eye (and this is where your lumpy head comes into play). About 200 years ago, Franz Josef Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim promoted their research into the ‘science’ of phrenology. Phrenology is the study of skull morphology in relation to personality traits, and if that seems a little ridiculous it’s because it is. Gall and Spurzheim believed that the shape of your skull could determine twenty-four different ‘faculties’ that make up a person, which include things like ‘clingyness’ in relationships, destructive behavior, musical talent, metaphysical perspicuity, cautiousness, self-pride, acquisitiveness, verbal memory, disposition for color, number of sexual partners, and sense of direction. They travelled around Paris, lecturing to university students, and gained a small following. Unsuprisingly, the theory didn’t survive for very long as newer, more believable discoveries were made. However, using his knowledge of the human skull, Spurzheim himself made considerable contributions to neuroanatomy. He worked with Gall to publish books about the brain and central nervous system, but his open support of the infamous phrenology discredited him findings (Sanders et al., 2017).
It’s Time to Sleep!
During our visit to Musée d’Histoire de la Medécine, we had the opportunity to walk through the evolution of medicine and understand how it shifted from a theoretical approach to a scientific practice backed by tangible evidence and experience. Before medicine became a scientific practice, it was very much so based on folklore and word-of-mouth. With the technological advancements and understanding of the human body that we have today, it is hard to imagine that people used to be so willing to try treatments with no actual evidence that it won’t harm them or that it even works. However, this isn’t really a different approach to medical treatments now, as most people simply want something to cure their maladies without understanding the mechanisms behind it. It’s the same ‘if it works, it works’ approach that people had before doctors could outline the positive and negative consequences of any treatment. As with any new development or discovery, we should expect that same learning curve, but now we can account for larger implications of those discoveries. Continue reading “It’s Time to Sleep!”
Without a Commander?!
During our class visit to Musée Fragonard at the École Veterinaire d’Alfort, we saw many cabinets full of organs, medical conditions, and abnormalities. A few cases displayed some of the first models designed to astonish the public and teach them about the structure and function of animal and human anatomy. A piece that stood out to me was the model of the lamprey’s circulatory system. Though I was not interested in the lamprey’s circulatory system, the model reminded me of the role of central pattern generators in the locomotion. The ever-famous experiment done on a cat whose spinal cord was severed and was observed to walk and run on a treadmill was a cornerstone study in the discovery of central pattern generators.
In NBB 301, we spent a lot of time discussing central pattern generators, which are described as motor control centers located in the spinal cord that can activate motion in the peripheral body without input from the brain. In other words, if the brain were separated from the spinal cord, the motor action could still occur. When I say brain input, I am referring to a series of neural pathways that send a command down the spinal cord and into the periphery to activate muscle effector neurons causing an action to occur. There are few actions that can be outsourced without a higher command, but lampreys provide a great example a central pattern generator as a means of locomotion. Continue reading “Without a Commander?!”