senior thesis, my dreaded nemesis, we meet at last

I have a feeling that this is either going to go really, really well, or kill somebody.

I don’t commit to anything half-heartedly. Whatever project I choose to tackle for the three terrifying months between myself and graduation will have my undivided attention; I’ll be all over it like a cheap suit (according to my father). So either the project flourishes under obsessive scrutiny, or I’ll go crazy with the stress of trying to make everything work.

idea numero uno:

Throughout my life, I’ve had various affairs with every possible kind of visual art: graphite, charcoal, pastel, watercolor, acrylic, clay, film, binary code, polaroids, beads, thread and yarn, photographs. Each and every one has stalled, some earlier than others, at the point where I realize that my ability with the medium will never be enough to create what I want. I am not a particularly talented artist, despite the desperate need I have to create things. Childish as it is, I eventually get so frustrated with my inability to create what I imagine that I give up, and move on.

In the middle of one of those fits of transition, where I was ditching any and all thoughts of painting in acrylic, I picked up collaging.  I know this sounds utterly ridiculous, but it was a little like finding God. I struggled so hard with drawing and painting, with sculpting, with photography; I put in weeks and months, years of effort, I did battle with the medium. But making my first collage was like coming home; it was effortless and familiar, like something I had always been meant to do. Creating that collage was like building a poem, in the sense that I could feel the words in every clipping, in the sense that I physically placed them where they belonged, in the sense that I constructed some small piece of my consciousness.

It was a rush, to be able to say so many things without words, to be able to say so many things that could never be put into words.

…

So idea numero uno is to create a book of my work, somewhere between twenty and thirty pieces, with each piece being a poem/collage combination. I’ve already done this once, as a gift to a lover, but that was so much more for her. I want this piece to be about me, to be simply mine in a way that book wasn’t.

idea numero dos:

Last semester, while I was working for the Champlain College Publishing Initiative (CCPI), Tim Brookes and I began collaborating on a project with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) that would allow doctors in remote parts of the world to share their experiences and observations with other doctors on a blog, via SMS text messaging.

Discourse within the scientific community is rigidly structured; your conclusions and theories only matter if you have completed a carefully controlled study with all possible factors accounted for, which has since been reviewed by various members of the scientific community and, in many cases, your study has been repeated with the same results. For a doctor working in the remote stretches of Africa or Asia, isolated from the scientific community and working with very few resources, entering into that discourse is nigh impossible; beyond the technological barriers separating these doctors from the community, it is impractical and, in many cases, impossible to set up a study with the kind of strict controls necessary for the data to hold weight (scientifically speaking). As a result, the observations and experiences of these doctors have been lost.

The project, which still has both feet fairly firmly on the ground at this point, would recapture this lost knowledge. Although these doctors have very limited or no access to the internet, many of them do have cellular phones and fairly consistent access to cellular service. The project would set up a relay system, which would receive text messages and post them onto a blog; the doctors would express their observations and experiences through a string of text messages, which would then be compiled into a single post and published on the blog.

This project is intensely interesting to me, and I was thrilled that Tim had initially asked me to be a part of it. Although it may be difficult to tackle this project as my capstone project—I’d be relying on the timely participation of several individuals and spending a decent amount of someone else’s money—I think that it would be an invaluable experience; I’d be learning to coordinate and manage, to plan ahead, to communicate with figures of authority, to beg for money, and so on and so on. But, first and foremost, it would be helping fill a large gap in the scientific community that I think needs to be filled.

idea numero tres:

Write a short story in which I do not kill a small child.

(Seriously. I'm on twenty-one years and counting.)

applied lessons [four years out and i remember...]

ECONOMICS 101 - WEEK TWO - THE NYSE

you succumbed to
economics, your body expanding
to a street, a building
windows blossoming on the soft
skin of your
elbows, the backs of your
knees, watching me from the forgotten
places. Your fingers were stained
with losses, gains
capital
free enterprise,
and dragging
the contours across my pillow, you smudged
dollar signs
into the wrinkles.
a wall of computer
screens flickered beneath your eye
lids, reds and greens pulsing
against the thin
skin, the waxy, papered
layers,
the frantic
spikes vivid in the dance of your
eyeballs, measured in the ticker tape
machine of your lashes
and every noise
you made was a thousand
men, screaming
“buy buy buy.”

and all i wanted
to do was take my body
off the market,
and demand
that you invest
your hard-
earned cash
in someone
else.

applied lessons [five years out and i remember...]

BIOLOGY 101 - THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD - EUPHORIA THEORY

i took a walk

downtown in the hazy

afternoon, kept quiet and found

children experimenting with their lips in the park.

it made me miss experimenting

with yours, it made me miss repeating

protocols.

it's all in the moment

before, that look you give me without ever

realizing it - your eyes

widen, your irises

darken, grow heavy until your gaze

can't help but

sink to my lips. and i, the tease, i stop

breathing, i let my heart slide

up the curve of my throat, let it fall

out onto my lower lip, cling to the

thin, torn skin and paint it

red. i slide my fingers over your

jaw, your lips, reaching past your

skin to draw your

heart upward, to watch the spark that hits

your eyes in the moment your heart tastes air, the moment

it curls into the delicate

contours of curves and scars.

it's all in the moment

before, in the momentary

hesitation, in that moment when my

lips are almost touching

yours. your heart reaches out with desperate, needy

hands, searching for mine, grabbing for mine. and then it's all

in the moment of, in the meeting, in the second when my heart reaches

back for yours, when i can't help but give in, when our mouths

collide, and our hearts get tangled

up in one another. i confuse

my senses in the intensity, until

i can feel the shades

of your skin, taste the soft

peach and rose tones of your lips, see the soft

sounds you can't help

but make when i touch the skin on your inner

lip that's barely two

years old. and you, you almost forget

what to do with your hands, and then your

fingers feel like summertime

on my skin, like spring in my hair. our hearts

play tag around my insides, chasing

each other through my veins

and arteries, leaving my capillaries

echoing with laughter. and then it's all

in the moment after, when our hearts

are reluctantly untangling. my senses

start to settle into their proper

categories, with my eyes finally seeing and seeing

yours, vivid and deep, soaked, 

spiked. i can feel

the same mixture running under my skin, like white water rapids across

my knuckles, my cheeks. it's in that moment when i know that i will never

get enough of you, that i will never

tire of your lips, your

skin, your hair; my molecules are too much

in love with yours.

biology, explain yourself to the artist [empathy]

THE SCIENCE OF BEING

In my sophomore year of high school, Mrs. Carolyn Kelley taught us that lichen is actually a combination of a fungus and cyanobacteria, a type of algae. Underneath a microscope, the pale, uninteresting lichen that I had known all my life became a complex tangle of fungi and vibrant, blue-green spheres; it became beautiful. Since that discovery I have been fascinated by biology and uncovering how living things work.

This segment, posted once monthly, is meant to shed light on those things that make us human, on the scientific explanations for creative and emotional experiences. For most people, and certainly for most artists, science is written in an inaccessible language of seventeen syllable Latinglish terminology that may as well be the German Enigma code. It’s my job to dig through all the ridiculous terminology, over-labeled diagrams, and incomprehensible bio-babble to figure out what makes us tick, as humans and as artists, and to lay it out in plain English.

In choosing a topic for the first ever post, empathy seemed most appropriate because it is an experience that is essential to human interaction and relationships. Traditionally, and especially amongst artists, empathy is discussed and understood strictly in an emotional sense; like love, empathy is perceived as an intangible feeling, a romanticized notion that science cannot explain.

But science can explain.

EMPATHY

Noun. Understanding and entering into another’s feelings; identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and/or motives.

If you’ve ever burst into tears in the middle of a Disney movie or winced while watching people eat spiders on Fear Factor, you’ve felt empathy. If you’ve ever seen sadness in a friend’s eyes, or sheer joy in their smile, or the glow of excitement in their cheeks, you’ve felt empathy. The experience of empathy creates a universal bond between human beings that transcends language, culture, and community, giving us the means to know and bond with other people. Without empathy, we would never be able to love, laugh, or create art; we would never be able to explain our emotions to others, or understand how another person is feeling. Without empathy every human being would be an island: isolated, inaccessible, and endlessly alone.

All mammals display some degree of empathy. This inherent experience is a prerequisite for understanding the experiences of other people, for bonding with those people, for loving those people. For artists, empathy is an essential skill that allows us to create and imagine characters worlds apart from ourselves, to construct the emotions and the motives of a consciousness different from our own; empathy is an inherent part of our imaginations.

Although the origins of empathy in humans and in mammals are still being explored, the current theory is that the roots of empathy lay in maternal instinct. According to Dr. Frans de Waal, who is searching for the evolutionary steps to human empathy in chimpanzees, our closest relatives, “mammals need a mechanism like this because a female needs to be very sensitive to emotional signals that come from offspring”^[1]. In theory, the necessity of females to catch the slightest emotional changes of their offspring has allowed all humans to be sensitive to the emotions of others, even so far as to have an automatic, neurological reflex that aids in this understanding.

In April of 1996, three neuroscientists working at the Università di Parma in Italy discovered a bundle of cells in the premotor cortex of a macaque monkey that were active both when the monkey performs an action, and when the monkey observed one of its fellows performing an action^[2][3]. The trio termed these cells mirror neurons.

Scientists have since proved the existence of a mirror neuron system in humans. The human brain has a much more extensive and complex network of mirror neurons, reflecting not only the actions of others, but sensation and emotion as well^[4]. This is the “neural mechanism by which the actions, intentions, and emotions of other people can be automatically understood”^[5].

When the human body experiences pain, several different regions of the brain are activated, allowing you to understand and experience the sensation^[6]. These regions can be separated into two primary groups based on function; one group is responsible for the sensation of pain, while the other is responsible for determining the origin of that sensation. The first group allows us to feel pain; these parts of the brain receive and interpret signals from nerves in the affected region and translate those messages into a physical sensation of pain (dull, sharp, pinching, burning, etc). The second group locates the pain; these regions work to determine the specific location of pain on the body, and work to determine what is causing the sensation of pain^[7].

This first group is part of the mirror neuron system in human beings. When you see another person in physical pain, those neurons are activated, allowing you to experience something of the pain you are observing. These same neurons will also fire when you attempt to imagine yourself or another person in pain.

Imagine, for instance, that you have just shut your hand in a door. Even if you have never experienced this particular painful accident, you can still imagine the heavy, crushing weight of the door, the sharp line of the edge on the back of your hand. At this moment, neurons in half a dozen regions of your brain are active, allowing you to understand that (imagined) sensation^[8].

But what if you have never experienced pain? Congenital insensitivity to pain (CPI) is an extremely rare genetic condition that eliminates a person’s ability to experience pain; people who suffer from CPI cannot and have never felt physical pain^[9]. However, studies have shown that people with CPI can still empathize with those who do. In a study conducted earlier this year at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Dr. Nicholas Danziger asked patients with CPI and control subjects (who experience pain normally) to imagine the feelings of various individuals in photographs. These photographs showed either “body parts in painful situations,” (a hand in a door, perhaps?), or “facial expressions of pain”^[10]. Although patients with CPI rated the pain experiences of the ‘painful situation’ photographs as far less intense (than control subjects), they were able to infer pain as accurately as control subjects^[11].

Based on brain activity, Danziger theorized that patients with CPI may have been relating observed physical pain to emotional pain they had experienced. Scans of their brains during the study showed activity in regions of the brain involved in “formulating emotional perspectives”^[12]. This ability to imagine and empathize with pain or situations we have never experienced is essential to human interaction.

Among many other symptoms, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are unable to empathize; while observing others, children with ASD will not be able to determine if someone is happy or sad without those emotions being specifically and clearly expressed verbally^[13]. Currently, scientists are testing the theory that an impaired or non-functioning mirror neuron system is what limits or eliminates empathy in ASD patients. At the University of Tokyo in 2007, a group of scientists used sympathetic yawning to measure the empathetic response of children with ASD^[13]. Sympathetic yawning – ‘catching’ a yawn from another person – is a function of the mirror neuron system, and ultimately an empathetic act^[13]. During the study, children with ASD and “typically developing” (TD) children were isolated and asked to count the female faces in a video (to ensure/measure the amount of attention paid). The video consisted of six clips of individuals yawning, and six clips of people opening and closing their mouths (‘control’ clips); between each clip of yawning or mouth opening, a silent cartoon played to hold their attention^[13]. The results showed that TD children yawned far more during the clips of people yawning than during the control clips, as expected, displaying sympathetic yawning^[13]. Children with ASD, however, yawned equally during both sets of clips, and yawned less than TD children ^[13].

Scientists suspected an impaired or non-functioning mirror neuron system might also play a role in aggressive conduct disorder (CD), “a behavioral and emotional disorder of childhood and adolescence”^[14]. Children with CD “act inappropriately, infringe on the rights of others, and violate the behavioral expectations of others”^[14]. CD is often found in children/adolescents who are verbally or physically abusive to other children, and is associated with childhood bullying. Expecting to find a lack of empathetic response, Dr. Jean Decety conducted a study at the University of Chicago earlier this year in which children with and without CD watched video of individuals being injured, accidentally and purposefully^[14]. However, fMRI scans (functional MRI, an imaging technique used to view brain activity) showed that children with CD had more extensive activation in the mirror neuron system^[14]. Even more surprising, the scans revealed active neurons in the amygdala and the central striatum, areas associated with positive reinforcement and reward^[14]. For those without CD, seeing someone in pain is “unpleasant, it’s negative,” Dr. Decety explains, “And for the bullies [children with CD], it’s not unpleasant. It’s really pleasant, it’s positive, it’s even rewarding”^[15].

SOURCES:

01: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125382470366238705.html

02: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/119/2/593

03: http://www.livescience.com/health/050427_mind_readers.html

04: http://www.livescience.com/health/050427_mind_readers.html

05: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070504121241.htm#

06: http://www.physorg.com/news152341493.html

07: [link dead - currently searching for a new source]

08: http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0604/features/emotion.shtml

09: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40302/title/I_feel_your_pain,_even_though_I_cant_feel_mine

10: http://www.physorg.com/news152341493.html

11: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/129/9/2494

12: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40302/title/I_feel_your_pain,_even_though_I_cant_feel_mine

13: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2391210/

14: http://tinyurl.com/atypicalempathicresponsesstudy

15: http://www.earthsky.org/interviewpost/human-world/jean-decety-says-bullies-brains-might-work-differently