Emz-the-geographically-variable

It’s after 21:00 Central European Time, and I am settled comfortably into the orange fake leather seats of an Intercity out of Amersfoort Centraal for the long commute home. My vouwfiets, a small blue bicycle on which I have already ‘logged’ 100 km this week (most of it in the drizzly rain or gail-force winds), is partially folded in the baggage area behind me.  My backpack is full of unread textbooks and journal articles and my computer is full of blank memory where MatLab computer programs need to be written, but I have had a long day fighting with equipment and two small bottles of ‘Bavaria’ in the company of my lab colleagues at a social event, and allow myself this brief respite to do something a bit more relaxing, which is catch up on my blog.

I am about 5 months out of date. Since Moscow I have been to Sardinia for a training exercise in a cave, back to Holland where I started my first neuroscience internship, to Rome for a conference, back to Holland, to Milan for Christmas, to Sardinia for some climbing and to just unplug for a bit, back to Milan and then Holland, where I started my second internship on Brain Computer Interfaces, to Milan to visit family and run up an Alp in the fog, back to Holland, to Switzerland for a ski trip, and back to Holland, the location of me now. I probably went to Germany for work at least once in there but I don’t really remember.  In my mind this produces what I call the “Alice-in-Wonderland Effect”, in which my environments, activities, and life jumps around so quickly I find myself at times quite amusingly mentally unprepared for popping in and out of all these worlds.

I must restrict myself to highlights or I will not get anywhere even during this train trip. The cave expedition definitely counts as one. I acted as a guinea pig to evaluate an expedition course which will be used to train astronauts. Unfortunately I can’t say much about the course itself, except a few notes on my personal experiences of living deep in the underworld for nearly a week.  This is really a  strange and wonderful experience. It is not often in adult life that one has the opportunity to enter a completely novel environment, and to observe the attempts of self and companions to adapt.  Darkness, when the headlamps are turned out, is complete. Even with headlamps on, the world is strangely distorted by the limited field of view and reach of the light. The first day is spent in deep concentration, since to climb, descend, and traverse safely various unusual tools must be employed. I had the impression the physical activity would be something like climbing, but this is not so much the case. You wear tough hiking boots instead of little climbing shoes, gloves instead of bare hands, and use equipment to ascend directly on ropes. Surfaces are very slippery and sharp and you must pay attention to move carefully and avoid nasty bruises. Regardless, the many unaccustomed activities leave you sore, and after a week, quite strong. There are quite a few challenges to be overcome psychologically, even for more adventurous types. The cave environment also varies considerably. In some areas you must crawl through tight little tubes in which even those not prone to claustrophobia begin to feel a bit of stress. There are also deep seemingly bottomless black voids, vast caverns in which you almost feel you are outside, river beds with crystal clear pools, muddy rubble slopes, and sparkling chambers filled with stalactites, stalactites, and many other formations. From an hour-long tourist tour in a cave, you may get the idea of some of the scenery and a hint that this is a magical sort of place. From a day or two in a cave system, you will certainly discover something of the nature of a cave and many of its more delicate wonders. From a week in a cave system, you have a completely different experience. You start to feel the strange effects of the lack of light on your perceptions of time. You have the opportunity to really explore areas that have been seen by few people before you. You start to adapt your life and habits to the cave environment, and you start to forget how bright are colours and how pungent are the smells of growing things, which are striking when you finally emerge back on the alien surface of the earth. And then a few minutes later, you cannot quite believe in the underworld of which you have recently taken leave.

…and POP! I was spending 10 hours a day in a windowless laboratory trying to learn how to use a horrifically complex two-photon microscope set-up. This internship involved studying how learning to expect a tasty food reward when a certain visual stimulus appears changes brain activity in mice. Mice smell offensive and pee on everything but they are cute. It’s fun when you can prove they have learnt a task, and we could watch them with a little video camera. The project itself was my first ‘real’ experience with neuroscience research. It was a good one, thanks to an excellent supervisor and good company in the lab, but it is not an easy area of work and is rife with frustrations, hard-earned solutions, unavoidable failures, and even a few successes. (Most people probably don’t think of research as such an emotional business, but it can be.) It was also quite a lot to digest in a short period, as to understand what was going on and to try and make a contribution it was necessary to learn something about physics, chemistry, biology, behavioural training, surgery, signal processing, and a lot of MatLab computer programming – not to mention all the background neuroscience research on brain activity in the mouse visual cortex. I tried to upload some pictures of my neurons but this program doesn’t like the file format, sorry, and I can’t seem to find one of the set-up.

At some point in October I had my eyes zapped. This was a brief but unpleasant experience, the second quality mainly resulting from my doctor’s complete lack of a bedside manner. I don’t consider myself particularly nervous or in need of soothing in medical situations but I think she could have said something like “Hello” before ramming metal appliances into my eye and slicing off parts of it. To this I had a very, very strong reflexive action to close my eye, which didn’t happen due to the aforementioned metal appliance, to which my wonderful doctor only said “Stop squeezing so much or you will damage yourself” and proceeded to do unspeakable things to my eyeball. In any case the damage I seem to have caused to myself was minimal, and my eyes are much better. Once I could peer out through a mass of gummy eye-healing goo I was back on the computer to finish my data processing and report-writing.

In October I also went to Rome and was able to go a for an extra few days to explore a nearby national park which changed my idea of Italy quite a bit. I won’t say much about the trip, which was an interesting adventure, but just show a few pics.

…and POP again, I appeared in Milan, Italy, theoretically on Christmas holidays but in reality sewed to my computer most waking hours trying to catch up on my long-neglected work for the Agency.

…and a minor sort of pop, since Milan to Olbia, Sardinia is not very far. This time the computers stayed at home (except for Gio’s mini one since two geeks like us never really go anywhere without a computer, but that was for entertainment rather than work). We stayed with a crazy mountain climbing / caving friend and had a rather active holiday, climbing, trekking, and biking in north-western Sardinia. For New Years’ Gio and I went on a long hike along the coast and camped on a beach under the stars with a big driftwood fire. It was a bit chilly but we seem to have developed a habit of camping at improbable times of the year, when there is usually no one at all. A small dog followed us out of a nearly abandoned mining town and for about 20 km in the hills without uttering a sound. Near our destination, its little legs were trembling with fatigue and it had to be helped over obstacles. We had no idea what to do with it except feed it some leftover sausages we had in the car (which inhaled at high velocity) and drive it back to the town from whence it came, looking for its owner. We left it in the company of a group of old men who were congregating outside the town’s one little bar, who identified the dog as belonging to an old lady in the town and wouldn’t believe our story.

…pop, pop, back to Milan and then Leiden, a mad rush to finish up my internship report and quickly switch to my second one, which is on brain-computer interfaces for brain state monitoring. After so soon ‘mastering’ (I use the term loosely) my previous internship topic, it was a bit depressing to be back at square one in a completely new field, fumbling awkwardly about in a new pile of academic literature. This stage always passes, though, and now I have a pretty good overview of the field and am instead engaging daily in lonely battles with my scientific equipment: 3 computers, an EEG (electroencephalograph) system and amplifier, a NIRS (near infra red spectrometry) machine, and a presentation computer all have to talk to each other with millisecond resolution, not to mention a hypoxia machine, pulse oxymeter, and a lot of other junk. Which might not be too hard except that the presentation – NIRS interface must be done with analogue cables (old school!), the presentation-EEG computer connection must be digital, and the two resulting humungous data files must be comprehensible and compatible by the end of all this. The makeshift arrangement was ‘finalized’ by our technician the day before he took a medical leave of absence of unknown length, so I got a very quick and rough explanation of how it’s all patched together. Predictably, miscellaneous errors start occurring and questions arise that no one in the building seems to have answers to, meaning a whole lot of miserably slow trial-and-error on my part in a computer language whose name I don’t even know.  Buuut, I’m sure in a couple of months I will be struggling with some other problem and will hardly remember today’s.

Anyway, the weekend is upon me (in name only as I have some other catch-up work to do) so I’d better wrap this up… tot ziens!