The Musée du Fumeur is a private museum of smoking. The museum is located in a smoke shop. The collection contains smoking instruments including European pipes, 17th century clay pipes, Native American ceremonial pipes, hookahs, Chinese opium pipes, Egyptian sheeshas, and snuffboxes, as well as cigars, tobacco samples, hemp-fiber clothing, and etchings, portraits, photographs, videos, and scientific drawings of tobacco plants. Explained through the museum’s website, “the usual objects of the smoker in different places or times mingle with the smoked plants around the world: the tobacco leaves are side by side with the sinsemilla flowers; the sieve for extracting the hemp resin, the cigar mold and the briar mouthpiece accompany the fragile earthen pipes of the eighteenth century or copper, which Chinese dignitaries wore on their belts to smoke opium” (museum website). As elucidated by the museum website, smoking is a unison of both the culture of a civilization and the geographical, geological environment which encompasses a civilization. Smoking, in a sense, resembles the balance between an individual and his or her relationship with the place in the world that he/she is located, a representation of the active, two way dynamic between an individual and mother nature. Continue reading “Class Visit Musee de Fumeur”
Photo Post 4: Which way?
John O’Keefe recently discovered cells in our hippocampus responsible for our sense of direction, termed “place cells” (Makin, 2015). The cells are activated when we move locations, so a groups of them can a form map of an area in our brain. With so much to look at in Paris, it was hard to always pay attention to where we were going and activate those place cells. Here are some pics of my roommates and I lost in Paris. They don’t capture the most emotional distressing times or the countless times we started walking down the wrong street and turned around a few moments later. Even if we didn’t get to where we wanted quickly, we got to see a lot of Paris.
Makin, S. (2015, May). The Brain Cells behind a Sense of Direction. Scientific American Mind. Retrieved from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-brain-cells-behind-a-sense-of-direction/
Everyone Needs a Hector
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”
Photo Post 3: Parisienne Music
One of my favorite parts about riding the Paris metro is the music. The Paris metro association actually holds try outs for musicians to receive permission cards allowing them to play on metro platforms and in metro cars. My favorite musician is a young violinist who plays at the exit near the Musée de l’homme (which has debatably the best view of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, so is a huge tourist spot). Music triggers the release of dopamine in our brain, making us feel happy and often emotional when we hear it. Going to hear that violinist at the Eiffel Tower was chemically irresistible.
Photo Post 2: Family Tree
Family trip to the Musée de l’homme! Did you know that humans still carry Neanderthal DNA? The Musée de l’homme has an entire room on Neanderthals and the human view of them. Media has historically portrayed Neanderthal-like characters as unintelligent cave dwellers carrying clubs and speaking in grunts. However, we should be careful to so quickly criticize our distant relatives. We now know that Neanderthals had Broca’s areas (the language-processing part of the brain), suggesting that they may have communicated with language (Lieberman, 1992). As a response to the stigma against our ancestral relatives, there was a sculpture in the Neanderthal the museum of a being with typical Neanderthal features, wearing modern human clothes.
Lieberman, P. (1992). On Neanderthal speech and Neanderthal extinction.
Photo Post 1: Running through the 75015
These sweaty pics are from when Emily and I went on a sunset run to the Eiffel tower (only about a mile from our apartment). The sky was pink and everyone was in awe at the tour d’eiffel’s beauty. Next to everyone dressed up for photo shoots, I felt like a local. Even though my runs through Paris haven’t been frequent, they’ve all been beautiful. We’ve all heard that running induces your brain to release endorphins, but what other neurological changes does running facilitate? According to a number of studies, running promotes cell proliferation in the brain (Rhodes et al., 2003; Van et al., 1999). While it is still debated whether this neurogenesis facilitates general learning or improvement of motor control, it’s clear that running helps your brain…and see more of Paris.
Rhodes, J. S., Van Praag, H., Jeffrey, S., Girard, I., Mitchell, G. S., Garland Jr, T., & Gage, F. H. (2003). Exercise increases hippocampal neurogenesis to high levels but does not improve spatial learning in mice bred for increased voluntary wheel running. Behavioral neuroscience, 117(5), 1006.
Van Praag, H., Kempermann, G., & Gage, F. H. (1999). Running increases cell proliferation and neurogenesis in the adult mouse dentate gyrus. Nature neuroscience, 2(3), 266.
Language in Neanderthals to Now
On Wednesday, June 13th, our Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology class visited the Musée de L’homme Exposition Néandertal. At the front entrance of the museum, there was a wall of signs saying “Welcome” in an assortment of different languages. Later on in the museum, there was an interactive activity in which we could wear headphones to try and emulate the language sounds of Neanderthals. Continue reading “Language in Neanderthals to Now”
Rugby and concussions (Photo post 4)
On the first weekend of our program, our class went to a French rugby game. Although I didn’t know the rules of rugby, I still had a great time watching players piling up and colliding each other. There were lots of collisions between players in the game and some of those may even result in concussions. As we learned in our 402W class, concussions result in long-term cognitive deficits, such as memory problems and shrinkage of the brain area. Therefore, it would be important to know the possible risks of participating certain sport with high collision. risk. In the end of the game, we watched Mika’s concert. The lighting effects were great and I’m glad that I went to the game!
The rugby game
Robot Artists (Photo post 3)
During the program, Gracie, Ruhee, Janet and I visited robot museum in Grand Palais as a group bonding event. It was really unfortunate that we visited the museum on the day after our first neuroethic blog post was due, since I wrote about robot artists in my blogpost. In the museum, we saw lots of interesting arts created by robots. I was really amazed that people programed the robots so that they can learn and create. I was wondering, can neuronal activities explain human consciousness? Every second, our brains are processing internal and external stimuli. The decision of whether or not to fire a neuron is depended on the combination of stimuli. However, we still have so much to learn and explore about human brain. Therefore, research is highly important in neuroscience!!
The robot monk
The island castle: Mont Saint-Michel (Photo post 2)
In the last weekend during the program, Jeffrey, Ruhee and I finally visited Mont Saint-Michel. We took a two-hour train and a one-hour bus to get to Mont Saint-Michel. Since it is located on a bay and the water surrounding it looked pretty shallow, we thought we could walk to another mini island not so far from Mont Saint Michel. However, we clearly failed. Ruhee and I both dropped our phone and we confirmed that iphone 7 above is water proof. When we were walking on the sand, there were breezes blowing on our faces and the water was a bit chilly. I felt really calm. It must be related to how our brain process sensory input. Moreover, those input may trigger my memory with similar sensory input. I enjoyed the visit a lot and I hope someday Ruhee, Jeffrey and I could actually walk to that mini island.
The island crew