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My Brain Diary, Part 14

My Brain Diary, Part 14

And maybe, I hope, the last. Unless something miraculous happens and there are significant improvements or something terrible happens and I need more surgery. Neither case is very likely. Things are pretty well stabilized and my MRIs continue to look good.

It’s still very frustrating that my brain doesn’t work the way it did before. People see me and talk to me and say how amazing it is, they would never know I had a problem. I respond politely because their intentions are good and they can’t possibly know how much more difficult certain things are. I guess it’s a good thing that I have ADHD, because it’s taught me how to accept that I can’t change and figure out ways to compensate instead. That doesn’t mean I have to like it!

The anomia comes and goes. I’ll have days when I’ll forget most of the names of people whose faces come into my head, not be able to tell anyone what a thing I want or am looking for is called, or even identify something I’m holding in my hand verbally. But since it happens so often, I don’t get as agitated when people try to help me by suggesting words (that are often wrong) while dredging through my memory for a connection that’ll bring the word to the surface.

I’ve learned little tricks to work around my still slightly impaired sense of direction. Most of them involve planning ahead. That’s not my forte, but I try. When I don’t, I turn on navigation on my phone. I need to look at a larger picture to get a sense of relative position of everything, so even when I’ve already been somewhere I might pull out a map and spread it out so I can position the place mentally among multiple spots I’m already familiar with.

Since the last Brain Diary, I’ve been to school for Cosmetology and am waiting for my license to arrive any day (week, month. . .) I know, it doesn’t sound sciency at all. You’d be surprised, but that’s beside the point. Learning new things and performing services with my hands was not only great occupational therapy, but also gave me insight as to some particular effects I need to work around that I might not have noticed otherwise. For example, at the beginning, I would need to hold a picture of a hairstyle up to the mirror next to my mannequin head so they were both facing the same way, because I couldn’t mentally flip images. I still have to do some extra thinking sometimes, especially if I’m looking at something that’s asymmetrical, and sometimes I need to have my hands on a head at the same time as I’m looking at a picture. I also need to go very slowly right now to create symmetry, because as I go from one side to another my visual perception and body angle change unless I pay very close attention to altering my posture and directional gaze.

I simply can’t “do the same thing on the other side.” Braiding taught me this in a singularly humiliating way. I needed to find something that stayed the same no matter which hand was working because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t mirror what my right hand was doing with my left. If you watch me as I do it, you’ll see that I don’t hold my hands or the hair the same in both hands. The harder I try, the worse I do, and the more frustrated I get. I need to look at it almost as if it were two separate things I was doing. I described it to my fellow students as if I was trying to make a braid on two different heads, one hand for each. (Plus, I need to learn this for each different braid, and there are lots of them.) It was the first thing we learned, and the last thing I figured out. I’m still a ways from mastering it, and if I make up a stunning new design, it’ll be completely by accident!

This distorted sense of spatial relations is even worse on myself. Yeah, everyone says they have trouble doing their hair or makeup in the mirror, but I remember what that was like. It was like what I deal with now when working on someone else. Just like with the map, I need to establish points of reference that are outside myself that I can associate with one another. If the main point of reference is ON ME, that just can’t happen. I have become less inefficient at doing my own hair, but it’s still kind of comical how many different directions my comb and brush will go on different areas of my head and how many things I hit with the blow dryer that are not anywhere near my hair. My style is different every day because I can’t do it the same no matter what. I let people think it’s all creativity, but the most creative thing is figuring out how to get it to look like I did it that way on purpose. More often than not, I had an idea, tried to do it, then pulled out super strong holding products for damage control.

The other things I tried to do on myself were very useful for pinpointing specific deficits. I got it into my head that fake eyelashes would be better than mascara, and spent countless hours trying to put them on, went through three tubes of adhesive, and threw out 8 pairs of lashes and three packs of individuals before I gave it up. Towards the end, I realized that not only does my right eye not close independently without squinching it up tight, but it has weird “blind spots” where I can see colors and shapes but not “understand” what they are. I would finagle my way around getting a lash strip on my partially-open right eye, but when it came to the left, these “blind spots” made it impossible to put one on. I’d try with the left eye open enough so I could see through it, but each time my hands or wrists covered one eye or the other, my “sense of direction” would change. I’d have the strip placed perfectly, say, on the outer corner, but once I moved towards the center and one eye or the other was even partially blocked, I’d start pulling the strip in the wrong direction and sticking it to the middle of my eyelid, the tips of my lashes, or even pulling it off. It was during one of these frustrating sessions that I stopped and just covered and uncovered my eyes one at a time and realized that the world moved in different ways from one eye to the next and made more sense in the left than the right.

Makeup is a bit more symmetrical now, but that also took some training. Initially, I had to use pencils or chopsticks or other long, straight guides to make marks on my face, and even then I would end up with one side higher or lower than the other, farther out, closer together, darker or lighter. I still have to step back frequently because up close the right and left sides are perceptually disconnected. I won’t lie, there have been a lot of tears. When you’ve been doing something for 30 years with almost no thought at all and suddenly it requires slow going and meticulous attention to seemingly superfluous details, it makes you feel impaired. Even if it’s just something as silly as having to give up eyeliner because you can’t draw a single smooth line on your face anymore.

The good thing about this is that with the improved awareness of what’s doing what, I am getting better at accepting and compensating for my new set of neurological differences. They’re not going to change, or they would have by now. So here I am.

Oh, noes, GMOs!

Oh, noes, GMOs!

GMO-corn

Everyone calling vociferously for labeling GMOs on the internet seems to go silent when they are asked specific questions about why, and how much labeling they’re actually asking for. Turns out, they usually don’t know how genetic modification is done, how many different kinds of modifications there are, how much actual potential harm there is or isn’t, or, quite frankly, how digestion works. (If it worked the way some alarmists believe it does, I’m afraid we might have to turn to cannibalism!)

Labeling something “Contains GMOs” is not only uninformative and misleading, but will add an average of $500 to each American’s food bill if it were to be instituted. Also, in order for a label to be useful and valid, it would need to be much more detailed. So I would like to break it down a little more realistically.

BT TOXINS!!

Bacillus thuringiensis is applied liberally on organic crops to control pests. Catalogs that sell Bt to home gardeners describe it as “Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a natural occurring, soil-borne bacteria that has been used since the 1950s for natural insect control.” (Planet Natural) and “Bt is a naturally occurring bacteria with many powerful insect-specific strains. Like other biologicals, Bts biodegrade in sunlight and may require reapplication. Bt for Caterpillars & Worms: Safe for the user and the environment, Bacillus thuringiensis v. kurstaki is a pest control mainstay for organic vegetable growers.” (Grow Organic) You would not find any food in the supermarket that would be labeled “Genetically modified with Bt,” because those crops are not used to feed people, but for animal feed and other industrial uses. You would, however, find lots of foods labeled “Sprayed with Bt,” at least if labeling were honest.

So why is it that Bt is safe and organic when sprayed in large quantities (where it drifts and affects insects that are not feeding on the crops, including some beneficial species) but suddenly becomes “Bt toxin” when it is engineered into the crop and affects only the pests that feed on the crops? The EPA has done thorough testing on Bt (http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/biopesticides/pips/regofbtcrops.htm) and assured that GM crops with the gene that produces the Bt protein are not in foods meant for human consumption, even though humans do not have the body chemistry that allows Bt to be absorbed.

Big Organic wants to have its cake and eat it, too. In order to continue using Bt itself for pest control, but demonize it as a toxin when it’s made by the plant itself, the very sites that make these statements do some unscientific speculation as to how this is so and present it as factual. Were they to admit that Bacillus thuringiensis is Bacillus thuringiensis and is harmful only to specific species (not human) that are directly exposed to it, they would not be able to continue their hypocritical campaign to use and sell it while simultaneously representing it as a life-threatening dangerous substance.

ROUNDUP READY!!

You would see “Roundup Ready,” but that would be pretty uninformative, also, because many crops that are not “Roundup Ready” are treated with Roundup, because it is an effective dessicant. For example, a wheat farmer would use it to kill and dry his entire field so that all the wheat would be usable, and would not need careful (and expensive) sorting to ensure that a few green grains wouldn’t rot an entire silo of harvested wheat. So, GMO or not, a label saying “glyphosate exposed” would be much more useful. That, however, would be a decision one should make based on environmental concerns rather than personal ones, because glyphosate is toxic to humans in such large doses that you would need to drink about three gallons of it straight to get sick.

THERE’S FISH GENES IN MY TOMATOES!!

There would also have to be a label for trans-species modification. Scientists take a gene for a trait from one species (usually another species of something that we also eat, so we’re eating that gene already, just in some other food) and insert it into another. You would need to do some serious mental gymnastics to see how this would be harmful. You would also have to start giving up a lot of foods, organic or otherwise, because this is also used to protect crops against diseases that would wipe them out. Bananas and papayas and oranges would no longer exist, or might go extinct in the future, without the modifications that allow them to resist the fungi that kill them. You might also want to check out foods that contain other foods, and perhaps stop using recipes. Your Manhattan Clam Chowder has fish genes and tomato genes. . .

THERE’S FISH GENES IN MY FISH!!

The last label would be a cross-species modification. This is when a gene for a particular trait is taken from one species and transferred to a related species – like the gene from one type of salmon that triggers larger size to a smaller sized salmon. Again, if you were to avoid foods with this label, you would need to deny yourself foods that have been cross-bred and hybridized by man for thousands of years, which would be everything we eat. It’s the same process, but accelerated and without the negative characteristics of traditional manipulation by sexual selection.

Look at what we’ve done to purebred animals – hip dysplasia in German Shepherds, seizures in Boxers and Spaniels. . .When we tried to breed a rot-resistant potato by hybridization, we ended up with a potato that was kinda poisonous. Genetic modification is working on a rot-resistant potato that won’t make you sick.

GENES FROM THE SAME PLANT!!

Golden rice was created by moving a gene that produces Vitamin A from the leaves and stem of the plant to the grain. This is a technology that may be applied to other species later on. People destroying entire crops of golden rice because it’s GMO is an example of uninformed hysteria. So we’d need a label for this at some point.

If all you want is a nice, simple label that says “Contains GMOs” so you can make buying decisions without thinking, then stick with buying things that say “GMO-Free.” The GMO labeling being proposed by the Organic Foods Industry is not designed to inform or help people make healthy decisions, but to direct buyers to their own products. If you want labels that actually give you useful information, they’re going to be on almost every item in the store, and it’s going to cost all of us. And if you really want to know what’s in your GM food, check the EPA, the ISAAA’s GM Approval Database, and consumer information from the FDA.

If you want to see why the studies being cited as proof that GMOs are dangerous are not valid evidence, here are a few links. Academics Review looks at a large selection of studies and explains what they actually found and whether those findings are accurate. The Seralini rat tumor study was so deeply flawed that even a low-impact journal retracted it out of embarassment – lots of scientific explanation and criticism is collected at David Tribe’s blog. Skeptical Raptor breaks down the information in a recent meta-analysis of 1,783 studies, including at least 600 independently funded, which found no tangible dangers and many benefits of GM crops.

(Image source Also a good article!)

Where I Go For Science

Where I Go For Science

A friend of mine asked me for a few links to science sites so she could learn a little more, so I set to copying and pasting my bookmarks for her. Now I know why I lose so much time sitting at the computer. Most of these sites are life sciences, so sorry about the lack of Chemistry and Physics and such. Here’s the list. . .

Sites in my WordPress Reader, loosely arranged by subject:

Skepticism/Critical Thinking
Science or Not?
I fucking hate pseudoscience
Edzard Ernst
Why Evolution is True
Doubtful
Violent Metaphors

Brain Stuff
Neurobollocks
Left Brain Right Brain
Mind Hacks
Neurologica Blog
Wiring the Brain
Science Over a Cuppa
Gabriela Tavares
BPS Research Digest

Medicine
Science Based Medicine
Science-Based Pharmacy
Science-Based Life
Drug Monkey

Genetics/Epigenetics
Bits of DNA
Code for Life

Vaccination/Disease
Skeptical Raptor’s blog
Shot of Prevention
The Poxes Blog

Other. . .
Inspiring Science
Double X Science
Bishop Blog

Not on wordpress:

Not Exactly Rocket Science Not only a lot of interesting articles on Biology, but a weekly roundup of interesting links. (You can also visit The Loom and Only Human from here, plus some others, but these three are my favorites.)
In The Pipeline Chemistry, but a lot of it related to Pharmaceuticals.
Skeptical Medicine A critical look at both conventional medicine and pseudoscience.
Scitable Nature Publishing Group’s educational site.

Aggregators:

Phys.org
Research Blogging
Science News (limited access for free, but still a lot of good science.)
Science Seeker (you can filter what you see by checking the subject boxes to the right.)

I’m always checking for new places, especially those that would be good for people who are not scientists, but want to understand. I’ll take suggestions for anything that’s not behind a paywall or too difficult for non-academics!