I'm still alive!

My life it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged! In my defence University is a little crazy at the moment and I have also had a very intermittent Internet connection for well over a week now and that’s getting very irritating.

On Wednesday I took part in a skills session on the brain, it involved watching 3D movies, looking at fMRI scans and looking at human brains, that’s right real human brains! I got to hold one of the full, intact brains in my hands and it was a really cool experience, sobering but amazing. It was strange to think that not long ago someone was using what I had in my hands to live their life, that it made them who they were and allowed them to function, and that the small (but surprisingly weighty) thing allows us to do so much. Oliver Turnbull, the head of the school of Psychology put it well “The brain is a strange thing, you don’t really realise that you have one until you hold someone else’s in your hands” and he’s right, I’d never really sat and thought about my brain and everything it does, it was a very strange thing to experience.

The workshop was amazing though, I got to push my finger into the hemispheric fissure and touch the corpus callosum (which holds our hemispheres together) I literally had my finger inside someone else’s brain! The event involved 4 ‘stations’ the first I was at we looked at slices of brain that had been slightly plastically coated, still real but not very brain looking, we also saw slices of brains that were suffering from tumours and haemorrhages it was very interesting to see. The next station was the actual whole brain, the professor pointed out different bits and we talked about their functions and then the brain was passed around so that we could all get a feel of what it was like, very cool indeed! The next station was Guillaume’s one and we looked at a brain and saw inside using 3D glasses, it allowed you to have a good idea of where things sat as different pieces of the brain were taken away, something that’s very hard to do in real life. The final station was led by Oliver Turnbull, and he had several different hemispheres and lobes from various brains and showed us different parts inside the brain, as opposed to just the outside. We finished on this table a little early so he decided to split us in half and quiz us by pointing to bits of the brain and getting us to name them. My team won, and I identified 2 out of the 3 parts successfully so I take some pride in our victory!

I had a bit of a blonde moment in the brain workshop though, there were names written on the each table and the first one I went to had the name and the plate with the brain on was right above it, so I assumed that this was the name of the person whose brain it was. I then moved onto the next table and it said Giovanni (esteemed neurologist) and I thought it was a little odd that this guy had been a neurologist too as the last one had said the same. It wasn’t until I got to the final table and saw the words ‘Oliver Turnbull (head of school!!!)’ that I realised they weren’t the name of the person whose brain it was but in fact the person who was talking to us… smooth.

Anyway, enough of the brain stuff this blog is going to be huge! I’m really busy right now as I have two deadlines next week and a midterm exam on Wednesday so I’m rushing around like a blue-arsed fly trying to get everything finished and get some revision done!

I got my exam results back the other week and I got an A- in Positive Psychology and a C in Clinical and Health so I’m very pleased with that, I also got a letter from the head of school congratulating me on a good first semester and all my grades so far, so that made me very happy indeed!

In non-work related news we came first in the pub quiz in Bar Uno last week winning £30 and second this week winning £8, so that’s been good fun. It’s nice going out as a flat every week because before we did all get on very well but only a few of us really socialised outside of halls.

Right I’ve rambled on for long enough now! Hopefully I won’t ever leave it this long to blog again!