Cobbers on the Brain

As this class comes to a close, it marks not only the end of a semester, but the end of my undergraduate career; a bittersweet feeling as this chapter comes to a close. Thought my college career, the majority of my courses have been largely content based. Having the hopes of going to medical school, my nights were spent continually reading though notes in an attempt to memorize rather than apply as my future was dependent on my GPA. Neurochemistry was a breath of fresh air as I end my time here at Concordia.

Neurochemistry was different from all other classes I have taken, and in the best way possible. This course was largely applicable to both my future and everyday life, it allowed for open discussion and conversation rather than lecture and provided adequate time for deeper understanding while still challenging my knowledge and capabilities.

As I am dedicating my life to a future in medicine, this course helped to again spark my love for both learning and science. Rather than demanding memorization, Neurochemistry allowed for understanding and applicability. To be quite honest, before this class I was getting very burnt out on school. Combining late nights of memorization with the constant worry of grades, all love of learning became lost amidst the concern for my future. Neurochemistry was different in that it allowed time for comprehension and questions while still expanding my knowledge of the world around me. With the ability to spend an entire week on one scientific paper, we not only learned the information better, but were taught how to ask questions and move forward with our scientific curiosity. The skills that this developed are foundational to not only learning, but future success in all aspects of life as progress stems from the ability to ask questions and think critically.

Neurochemistry was also a course that was greatly transferable to many disciplines of learning. Beyond just the scientific aspect that you would expect in a course such as this, it taught a lot about social aspects of life as well. By learning about treatment, diagnoses, and having adult conversation about the emotions that surround each and every one of these diseases, I feel as if I am now better prepared to handle situations where either my knowledge on the subject is lacking, or emotional understanding is crucial. This gives me better cultural perspective of what other people and deal with in their lives, as well as how to help those around me who are struggling. It was also fun to see how our knowledge of the diseases were able to coincide with information we as science major have learned in previous courses.

Overall, I believe that this Neurochemistry course can most definitely be qualified as a capstone course. Not only do I feel that I am coming out of this class with greater knowledge concerning the brain, emotional, and social relationships, but I have been both humbled and sparked. Humbled in the sense that I now have a better grasp on how lucky I am to live the healthy life that I do and sparked in the sense that I feel that with my greater understanding I have the capabilities to make a difference through my career. I feel for the first time that after taking this class, I am now prepared to become responsibly engaged in the world as I head out into the “real world.”

Obesity has become an epidemic across the world, but especially in the Western world. Specifically in America, there has been an extreme increase in cases of obesity across the nation. 2/3 of adults and 1/3 of children in America are overweight or obese, which results in about half of the total population. The amount of children who are obese has tripled since the 1970’s. The Western diet is characterized by:

• overconsumption of sugars
• lots of saturated fats
• excessive animal protein
• reduced intake of plant-based fibers

Nearly 3/4 of Americans are not eating enough fruits and vegetables (plant-based) and consume over 1/2 of their calories by eating “ultra-processed” foods, which contain lots of sodium, trans fats, and artificial sweeteners. These foods are more convenient to purchase and eat as they are packaged for the on-the-go lifestyle and are often cheaper. Examples of ultra-processed foods common in the Western diet include:

• white bread
• potato chips
• frozen pizza
• soft drinks
• candy

Not only does the Western diet increase the risk of becoming obese, but it also increases the risk of becoming diagnosed with chronic diseases and the morbidity rate. Nearly 1/2 of the adults in the United States have one or more chronic diseases related to a poor diet. This is due to the increase of fatty, processed foods in our diet mixed with decreased exercise and sleep. 

Our gut health and immune system suffer due to the poor diets of the Wester world. Having a high-fat and high-sugar diet kills off the necessary bacteria in our body’s microbiome, causing the body systems to fall out of homeostasis. When our gut microbiome is compromised, diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension, can occur. In addition, our immune system struggles to differentiate between good and bad bacteria, causing an inflammatory response to be triggered. This inflammation causes the body to attack itself and stimulate an autoimmune disease or the inflammation that characterizes obesity.

Taking care of our gut health is crucial to control the Western diet. Some actions our nation needs to take in order to increase health awareness are:

• leading an active and healthy lifestyle
• eating less salt and sugar
• keeping gut healthy and eating more plant-based foods
• replacing bad fat with healthy fat
• choosing healthier processed foods such as: 
  • canned vegetables
  • frozen fruits and vegetables
  • whole grain pasta
  • nuts and nut butter
  • yogurts
  • canned and frozen fish

In order to battle the obesity epidemic, we have to target the youth and educate them on how to live a healthy lifestyle at a young age. If obesity is connected to the brain, teaching them how to best treat their body at a younger age will help them to develop healthy skills sooner and retain them for a longer period of time.

Since obesity affects a person’s health greatly, children who are obese with be at greater health risk. Eating healthy food, exercising, getting enough sleep, and having strong relationships are key to avoiding obesity. As obesity has a strong genetic factor, it is important to combat it with these techniques.

“Neurochemistry. What a beautiful word. Chemistry of the brain. It sounds so complex and I’m sure it is.” This is what I thought when I saw this class when I was registering last spring. I really had no idea about what was going on in the brain, I’ve never taken another neuro class so I was really excited to learn about it. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I had a few great friends that were taking the class as well. I was even more pleasantly surprised to find out that so many of the people in this class that I did not know before have now grown to be my friends. All of this along with learning something new? I couldn’t be happier.

I really enjoyed the community action project that we did with the social work students. So many times in our articles we look at cold, hard, scientific facts that we can use to help treat ailments that come out of some brain problem. However, the social work students remind us to view these people as a whole person, not just a patient in need of our help. This helped to show me that we have to do what is best for the person, not just treat them for the sake of treating them.

My favorite part of neurochemistry was our Friday discussions. Every Friday, we would go sit in some comfortable chairs and discuss what we had learned during the week about our paper. I loved this so much because I got to see so many different perspectives on the same idea. I got to see how somebody would treat a disease as a social issue and how we could possibly solve some of these issues. It gives everyone a good chance to voice some opinions, observations, or shed new light on something that others haven’t thought of before.

https://twitter.com/kernelcobb/status/76844603683661313

Concordia College has Five Goals for Liberal Learning:

• Instill a love for learning

Neurochemistry helped to instill a love for learning in our whole class. Every week there were so many things that were not understood about the paper, so we would take time to ask these questions, look for the answers, and share them with the class.

• Develop foundational skills and transferable intellectual capacities

For me, I found this class to help me work on my critical thinking skills; especially in exams when we were given a problem and we had to deduce how the pathway works and what was going wrong. Regardless of where we will be in our lives in the future, we will likely be working in some type of team. Doing the community action project, doing group discussions, and working together on papers will all help us in the future.

• Develop an understanding of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and intercultural perspectives and their connections

This course helped me to understand different brain disease and how they pervade societally and culturally in our world. We learned about Autism, Alzheimer’s, Anxiety, Schizophrenia, Addiction, Endocannabinoids, ALS, and obesity. All of these are prevalent in our world today and we are trying to connect them back to the brain. If we can better understand these things, we can better treat or fix these problems.

• Cultivate an examined cultural, ethical, physical, and spiritual self-understanding

The thing that gave me the best self-understanding throughout this class was writing these blogs. It really made me think about how I felt with the issue, what I think should be done, and what I still do not really understand. It’s really important to reflect upon your studies to think about these things. Though these blogs may have been “required”, I found myself looking forward to writing them because then I could think back upon the week and about what I learned.

• Encourage responsible participation in the world.

Together with all of the above, I believe that this class has encouraged me to BREW along with many other classes that I have taken in my time here at Concordia College.

So now after reflecting on my time in Neurochemistry I can definitively say that not only is Neurochemistry a beautiful word that is a complex and difficult problem, it is also more important in our world than I could have ever known because of all of its connections and my favorite class that I took at Concordia. I look forward to seeing what my classmates do in their futures and I hope that they all remember this class the same I will. I’m going to remember it as the time that “The Gang Does Neurochemistry”.

The neurochemistry course at Concordia College has been a pleasure to be a part of as it has solidified my interest in the mystery of the brain and led me to become a better scientist. As a neuroscience major, taking this class is a requirement for graduation. Although, I would recommend it to anyone willing to take on the challenge of understanding more about the fantastically complex interactions within the nervous system. I enjoyed discussing these brain pathways with a broad variety of individuals from an assortment of different backgrounds. This class allowed many different perspectives to be integrated into the ultimate interdisciplinary subject, neuroscience.

I have taken several classes involving the nervous system and brain, but none have given me the same sense of wonder or passion as provided from neurochemistry. It was a rewarding feeling to have finally accomplished all of the dirty work of understanding the basics of neuroscience and to apply it to a real-life problem. All too often do we get the sense that there is no point to anything we are learning in core curriculum classes. I spent countless hours studying brain regions and neural mechanisms of disease and got no sense of connection with the real world. But neurochemistry has made me realize what college is all about. This course allowed me to bridge the gap between what I know academically and what I know about humanity. There are a seemingly limitless number of diseases that can affect one’s brain and negatively impact their quality of life. Knowing more about just a handful of these diseases has provided me with a huge sense of fulfillment.

Another unique quality of this class was the emphasis on self-fulfillment rather than motivation through grades. Group projects in most classes involves splitting up an assignment, doing your own part, and never discussing or meeting with your group members. Although this can often result in good grades, no experiential learning occurs from it. Communication with others and self-efficacy are crucial skills to learn for our careers and the neurochemistry course has challenged us to pursue these goals.  Neurochemistry is set up in a different way from most classes because it is more than just a grade on the line. We were not pushed to get a project done by its due date just to get a grade and be done with it. We worked on it because we had intrinsic motivation to create the best possible product. It gives me immense satisfaction to know that when I work hard on a difficult task, I can come out with something that has use in the real world. This goes for both group work and independent research. After taking this class, I am much more prepared to work on tasks independent from immediate reward.

The main project in this class was the community action project. This project involved a group of 8 people coming up with a plan to better the community. The issue we tried to solve was the fact that caregivers of trauma victims are not really educated on how the brain is involved with PTSD. We decided to reach out to a facility that cares for trauma victims in Fargo called Fraser. Our plan was to find a way to educate these workers about the neurobiology of the disease to help them achieve a better understanding of what is going on in the brains of these victims. Although the idea was simple, the difficult part of this task was to integrate just enough of what we learned in neurochemistry without overwhelming the workers with irrelevant knowledge. Overall, I think this project went well and the workers seemed pleased to have some education on this subject.

This community action project was another example of how neurochemistry has allowed me apply what I know in neuroscience to a real life problem. Before this project, my communication of science has mostly been through presentations to an audience that already has a solid understanding of what I was talking about. This time, I had to analyze the background of my audience and tailor my communication to a level that would provide the most benefit. This skill is important in any career as we all talk to people of various educational backgrounds and need to develop a sense of how to convey our thoughts effectively.

Something I really enjoyed in this class was the set schedule of events that happened each week. Mondays were set aside for initial discussion of the week’s paper and answering any questions about it. On Wednesdays we would discuss specific topics of the paper in more detail, and of Fridays a class discussion would be held focusing on the big picture implications of what we talked about earlier in the week. I enjoyed how we knew what to expect each class period and knew exactly what to prepare for. Also, these weekly discussions have allowed me to really get to know the entire class more than I have in any other course. I think it is very important to have a close relationship with colleagues and the neurochemistry course has exercised this skill. When a group of people know each other well, the final product they produce will often be better because each person finds out where they fit on the team.

I hope to use skills I learned in this class in the future as I believe many of them are useful in daily life. With the plethora of knowledge about neurochemistry I learned aside, the basic human skills to apply to the real world made this class worth it for me. It is true that I did learn a lot about brain diseases and ways to fix or improve them, but I think the biggest thing I can take away from this class is to never be satisfied with what I know. The weekly research we did on specific topics has made me realize that we will never be able to fully understand a topic and that there is always more research to do. As I pursue my career in the field of neuroscience research, I will keep in mind what I have learned from my capstone experience of neurochemistry at Concordia College.

Weeks after week we discuss health topics and the relation to the brain. It seems a common motif is the story of inflammation and its role in knocking the body out of homeostasis.

Inflammation is a key factor in the body’s immune system. It is a signal to the body that something isn’t quite right, this could be a splinter or something more serious as arthritis or autoimmune diseases. Regardless, inflammation is a signal that launches your body out of homeostasis and demands a response.

Interestingly, excessive amounts of adipose tissue can induce a chronic low-grade inflammation. This constant low-level signalling prevents the body from operating at true basal levels, which when coupled to other factors can cause serious problems.

Interleukin 6 is a key cytokine in the inflammatory response that is well associated with cardiometabolic risks, such as coronary heart disease or metabolic syndrome. Other key inflammatory factors includes interleukin 1, interleukin 8, TNFα, leptin, and resistin.

Overeating induces metabolic overload and subsequent stress responses, like as previously discussed the inflammatory response, but as well as oxidative, organelle and cell hypertrophy contributing to the generation of vicious cycles that can be hard to break physiologically.

Insulin resistance is a key-marker in type II diabetes and the risk is significantly increased if an individual is obese. Adipocyte hypertrophy can induce inflammation, disabling the tissue’s ability to engulf fat which leads to fat depositing on other organs, especially the liver, which is vital for insulin regulation.

Excessive consumption of fatty foods (which is all too easy in western societies) induces oxidative stress, especially when antioxidant rich food is not eaten in conjunction with the fatty food; this contributes to inflammation attributed to obesity.

Diet and obesity alone are not fully responsible for the inflammation response, other factors are listed below:

• Circadian rhythm disturbances
• Age
• Gender
• Smoking
• Sedentary lifestyle
• Other psychological factors

It is clear there are environmental and genetic factors that contribute to an individual’s inflammation response and would therefore have a variable impact on the overall health of the individual.

It is clear obesity is a very important public health problem, especially in western societies. There is an obvious link between diet and overall lifestyle that can result in obesity. Unhealthy lifestyles can change one’s physiological response through inflammatory factors which are related to chronic degenerative diseases such as coronary heart disease. Although diet and excessive adipose tissue is an important factor in inflammation, there are other factors such as age, sex, sleep cycle, and smoking habits that play a significant role in the degree of inflammation.

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5507106/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2913796/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0185106316300737#fig0005

When I first signed up for Neurochemistry last spring, I was incredibly nervous to take the class. Having recently added a neuroscience minor to my music and psychology majors, I was afraid that I was not going to have enough background knowledge to succeed or understand the content in this class. Once we got into the rhythm of the class, I was pleasantly surprised that I was not as behind as I thought. Neurochemistry was a great class to have a capstone experience for many reasons.

First, the class itself was set up in a way that I have never experienced before. It is uncommon to be able to spend 3 class meetings on a single topic or article – I was glad we were able to do that. Especially in the sciences, the majority of our undergrad classes are spent rushing through as much lecture that will fit into a class period. First, deciphering difficult concepts in the articles we read was crucial to retaining information from about dense topics. I always felt that we could have continued conversations about each topic for another hour after class was over. After we figured out what we didn’t know, we were able to research interesting topics based on our requests. Having the ability to write out our own questions and interests for people to research for next class was so beneficial. We were able to be the teachers and the learners every week. Have that dual role in a classroom is difficult to achieve, but was done very well in this class. Lastly, my favorite part of the week was on Fridays when we would get out of the classroom and discuss freely. Physically leaving the normal classroom and extending class to another part of campus is fantastic for keeping students alert and interested.  Fridays were a time to really dive in to the societal issues of each topic and also showed off Concordia’s liberal learning goal of “instilling a love for learning.”

Secondly, Neurochemistry worked so well as a capstone because we were able to use information from so many of our past classes in order to understand the content fully. For example, to learn about how a disease works in someone’s body, we could pull knowledge about the molecular level of signal pathways in the brain and out to the body, the chemical makeup of a neurotransmitters malfunctioning in the disease, and many more areas of study. This is a perfect example of another goal of liberal learning, which says “develop foundational skills and transferable intellectual capacities.” What better way to do that then in this class. I was so thankful to have peers who knew so much about chemistry that I could learn from them and be brought up to their level while still sharing my knowledge of neuroscience and psychology.

Lastly, Neurochemistry exemplified what a capstone class should be like by being low-pressure class. What I mean by this is that it was not centered around grades, tests, or lab quizzes. Having a class at Concordia where people were striving to achieve the highest grade or just studying content to do well on the tests is vital to creating a holistic, liberal arts education. Grades were not mentioned by the professor nearly as much as they are in other classes. That created an environment in which the focus of the class was to simply learn about and explore different diseases that affect our society today. I appreciated having a low-pressure feel to this class – it felt like a perfect way to tie together all of these classes we have taken pertaining to these topics.

While there are many other reasons why Neurochemistry worked so well as a capstone class at Concordia, these were my main reasons that I thought about several times throughout the semester. I look forward to using this class when discussing diseases further in graduate school, at interviews with institutions that work with people suffering from these diseases and topics, as well as when discussing my education overall. Having the knowledge achieved from our 4 years at Concordia will only send us to bigger and better places in the future. Thank you for a fantastic capstone experience!

Fast food restaurant at every street corner. Packaged and processed foods becoming more and more available – even able to be delivered to our front door. Screens literally everywhere. It is not a secret that society in the United States has evolved into a more sedentary and often lazy lifestyle. We have the statistics to prove it. Almost 40 percent of adults in the US are considered obese, meaning that they have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30.0 or higher, according to the CDC. As with many health and societal issues in our world, it feels as though nothing can be done about it. But, we will not make any progress if we simply sit around and complain about these issues.

The cycle of obesity is very difficult to break. It effects many aspects of your body and brain, from parts of your central nervous system to certain proteins in your cells. Your body is stuck in a cycle of needing more and more, usually unhealthy, foods in order to main energy, thus creating changes to your body and lifestyle. If the obesity epidemic in the United States is this horrific, why don’t we focus more on not allowing the obesity cycle to begin? At least to the best of our ability. What I mean is with the kids. It is true that there have been a few campaigns through Michelle Obama, the NFL, and other organizations to try to get kids to be more active then they currently are. However, I don’t believe that we are doing enough. Below are some factors that contribute to obesity in children:

• Metabolism
• Community/Neighborhood
• Short sleep duration
• Genetics
• Eating and physical activity behaviors

As one can see, many of these factors are environmental. It is now uncommon to see children out together in neighborhoods simply playing. While parents and guardians are often worried about the safety of neighborhoods and streets for their young children, there are simple ways to ensure safety or find an alternative. Having parents of the neighborhood switch off watching the kids or going to the local community center during winter months and playing games in the gym are a few options. Changing the factors above is a start in the right direction to dealing with the issue of childhood obesity.

So, what’s next? Childhood obesity is arguably one of the most daunting issues to take on and try to solve. If we look at it on a small-scale level, there are a few things that we can encourage ourselves and children around us to do.

1. Less screen time. This doesn’t mean a full social media cleanse. Perhaps starting with taking out 30 minutes each day and seeing what effect that has on mood and energy levels.
2. Go for walks. I think that our sedentary lifestyle stems from our long work hours. This is where the responsibility of parents comes into play as well. If parents or older siblings created time in their schedule to go for walks with their children or siblings, safety during these walks would be covered.
3. Participate in sports or physical activity groups to the best of your ability. The issue of money and socioeconomic classes is often a barrier to participating in sports teams for kids. However, there are plenty of recreational teams through parks districts and schools that cost much less than traveling teams and leagues.

These are not fool proof options for improvement. It is also much easier to write ideas in a simple blog post than actually implementing these strategies in daily life. However, if we can start small with our own friends and family, who knows where that can lead?