Being back at college sure is tiring. Not that that’s news, I just want to complain.

Quick Summary of NEUR 114

It being a 100-level course, so far it’s mostly been a tour of modern-ish neuroscience. We talked about what neuroscience is and what it isn’t, ways to examine the brain, and so on. We also talked about radiophobes and how stupid it is to believe that cell towers broadcast things into your mind.

Neuroscience sorta straddles between actual science and psychology in weird ways. For example, in psych you study punishment/reward conditioning, and the reason it works is usually explained away as “neurons that fire together wire together” or “mental pathways” or equally wishy-washy things. Meanwhile in neuroscience we can actually codify and look at those things.

I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on psych. It’s like, linguistics : literature :: neuroscience : psychology. (Psychology and literature are also similar in that the “finest” parts of both are all incredibly dry and written by partially insane old white men.)

The brain is also self-modifying in crazy ways. We talked about how the brain can create signals in itself that look nearly identical to input from the senses, and apparently this is just a skill you can learn. Like sit down for a week and figure out how to trick yourself into seeing and feeling things. Weird.

Personal Stuff?

I don’t have a lot of friends.

I guess I feel OK saying that out to the anonymous audience of this blog, even when I don’t really want to tell people in real life. Not that I have anyone to tell about it, heh.

Guess I haven’t rebounded from the hard work of college. Classes are hard and I guess it sort of makes everything else feel worse. Like how spicy food makes temperature-hot food taste hotter.

What a stupid problem to have. Aren’t people supposed to have figured this out by high school? Either they have close friends they keep up with, or at least gained friend-making skills, or are OK being loners. Like people just look at each other and suddenly they just have stuff to chat about. Meanwhile I feel like I lost my friend-making skills when I went to middle school.

I have a hard time doing it online, too. People are so genuine online. Like people will talk about these intense, horrible life issues, and then bond over it, or bond over how they both like this obscure programming language or identify as the same 16-word long gender or whatever. I feel like an outsider here. I don’t even feel like I have anything to be genuine about.

There’s nothing interesting. It’s just me. What am I self-reflecting for? What am I trying to find?