nathalie_sml1
TRANSCRIPT
nathalie garcia(talking herself up!)
Collaboration
BrillianceTransformation
Curiosity
Macula
CuriosityThis is the story of the macula lutea.
The part of me that embodies curiosity.
This is a yellow spot, a few millimetres across, in the centre of our retina - that’s the layer of cells at the back of our eye that senses light and sends signals to our brain, so we see. Your retina is like film in a camera, and the macula at its centre is the most sensitive part. It’s good design, because it means your vision is keenest in the centre of your gaze, where you need to look most intently when doing things like reading.
Jesus and Mary: Macula is Latin for spot or stain, and it’s a word that has found its way into lots of modern-day expressions. A flat spot on our skin is called a macule. Order a macchiato from a barista and you’ll get an espresso stained with milk. Catholics believe that if you commit a mortal sin, you get tarnished with a macula - a stain on your soul. On the other hand, immaculate means spotless, hence the Immaculate Conception, which refers to Mary’s conception, not Jesus’, as many people mistakenly believe.
Yellow antioxidants: Our macula contains special yellow pigments which are also antioxidants. They give the macula the other part of its name: lutea is Latin for yellow.
Mothers and greens: Your mother knew what she was talking about when she ordered you to eat your greens, because they contain high levels of the macula’s antioxidant pigments. Eating veggies like broccoli and spinach may help our macula stay young, protecting it from macular degeneration, which affects many of us when we get old.
The Sydney Opera House: People with macular degeneration have problems seeing things they are focusing most intently on, but can see things in the corner of their eye. It’s the commonest cause of blindness in the western world - about 30,000 Australians over 50 are blind because of it. Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who designed the Opera House, is a sufferer.
CollaborationThis is the story of the corpus callosum.
The part of my brain that embodies collaboration.
Our brains have their wires crossed - straight up. Each side of our cranial supercomputer is separate and wired to the opposite side of our body. You could say we have two brains. The one on the left sends and receive signals to and from your right side, and vice versa for the one on the right. So how do the two sides of our world join to make a whole? The answer lies in our corpus callosum, a 10 centimetre long brain bridge between its right and left halves.
Saggy brains: Oddly, for such a big bit of brain, little is known about its job. In the 1950s, some people thought it stopped the two sides from sagging. Now we know it allows them to chat to each other. That’s important, because they think differently. Generally, the left side is skilled at language and analytical tasks, like maths; while the flouncy right half excels at music, recognising faces and navigation. It’s a good system - imagine if both sides controlled talking, you might be able to say different things out of each side of your mouth simultaneously.
Split brains: Splitting the brain in two by cutting the corpus callosum is a treatment for epilepsy. A bonus for researchers is that, with the corpus callosum disabled, they can study how it affects behaviour.
Strange doctors and Nazis: But splitting brains isn’t all beer and skittles. It can cause a freakish problem, called alien hand syndrome, where one hand takes on a mind of its own. This is how a woman described the conflict between her split brain’s disconnected halves: “I open the closet door. I know what I want to wear. But as I reach for something with my right hand, my left comes up and takes something different. I can’t put it down if it’s in my left hand, I have to call my daughter.” This handicap is also called Dr Strangelove syndrome. In the 1964 film, Dr Strangelove had a gloved right hand that kept trying to strangle him, or make a Nazi salute.
Cruelty and corpses: Our corpus callosum got the name because it’s a hard bit of brain. Cal-losum is from the Latin for hard. In English, a callus is thickened, hard skin; cruel, hard dudes are callous. Corpus means body - a corpse is a dead one.
corpus callosum
TransformationThis is the story of the myometrium.
The part of me that embodies transformation.
The myometrium’s special power is transformation. Its ability to reinvent itself is astounding. You see it when a woman gets pregnant, because her myometrium is her womb’s muscular wall. It makes up the bulk of this incredible expanding organ, which gets 15 times heavier during pregnancy and can swell to hold 2,000 times as much fluid.
Pears: This feat of transformation is achieved thanks to its myometrium, who’s muscle cells stretch to ten times their pre-pregnancy length. Before conception, the womb (uterus) is pear-shaped ball of muscle, weighing about 70 grams, with a tiny cavity that holds just 10 millilitres. By the time the baby is due, it has become a thin-walled balloon that can hold as much as 20 litres, weighs over a kilogram, and is strong enough to push the baby out with brutally powerful contractions.
Water bottles: Myometrium is from the Greek words mys (muscle) and metra (womb) - the metra part is related to the word for mother. The word myometrium is like myocardium - your heart mus-cle - which is where the term myocardial infarction (heart attack) comes from. Incidentally, the word uterus comes from the name for a leather water bottle Romans swigged from on hot days.
Footballs: One of the body’s commonest tumours grows in the myometrium; it’s a uterine myoma, aka fibroid. Perhaps more than 50% of women get fibroids, which can be smaller than a pea or larger than a soccer ball, and can grow to weigh over 20 kilograms. One treatment for them is to take out the uterus - a hysterectomy. Hyster- is from another Greek word for uterus.
Orgasms: Until recently, hysteria was an illness of the uterus that caused nervous symptoms in women. Womb-less men didn’t get hysteria, they held their nerve. The ancient Greeks believed the uterus was an animal that wanted to make babies. If it stayed sterile for too long, the animal got angry. One remedy involved massaging the “sufferer’s” genitals until she orgasmed. It took skill, a 17th century English medic wrote the technique was “not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other”. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 20th century that the term hysteria fell out of favour with medics.
Myometrium
Uterus
Cervix
Vagina
Ovary
Fallopian tube
BrillianceThis is the story of neurones and astrocytes.
They are the cells in my brain that embody brilliance.
The human brain is the most sophisticated microprocessor on the planet. Weighing just 1.4 kilograms, it creates as much power as a small light bulb, with a battery that lasts a life time. PCs and Macs are Stone Age by comparison. After all, the brains behind Apple and IBM is the genius of the human brain and its billions of neurons. These are the interconnected nerve cells that transmit electrical impulses and mastermind the way we think, create and invent. But neurons are only a small part of our brain’s story, because they are heavily outnumbered by a family of much less well-known brain cells, called glia. Astrocytes are the commonest type of glia.
Brain stars: Astrocytes have arms that radiate out like bicycle spokes and attach to neurons and small blood vessels. Their arms make them look like stars - the word astrocyte comes from the Greek for cell (kytos) and star (astron). Other star-related words with the same origin are: astronomy, as-trology, and astronaut.
Glue: The 19th century German doctor Rudolf Virchow believed glia were just dumb cells that provided a support network for your clever neurons. He called them nerve glue - glia is Greek for glue.
Myths busted: It’s often said we use just one tenth of our brain capacity. The implication being that the spare nine tenths of our brain power is sitting inside our head, kicking its heels idly while we miserably fail to fulfill our intellectual potential. It’s a myth designed to make most of us feel inadequate. It may well have arisen because astrocytes and the other glia outnumber neurons by about 10 to one. This latter fact was probably distorted into the former fallacy.
Aryans unstuck: Virchow’s notions about glia stuck, like glue. Only recently have scientists begun to realise that astrocytes do more than provide the scaffolding for neurons. It seems they work in partnership with neurons, influencing and maybe even directing neuron activity. Virchow did lots of stuff right though. He conducted a study among millions of German school kids and concluded there wasn’t a pure Aryan master race. Something other Germans, a few decades later, failed to appreciate.
Astrocyte
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